Re: WineX and the AFPL

"Deven T. Corzine" <[email protected]> writes:

> The LGPL collaboration will happen with or without Transgaming.  At worst, 
> they simply won't contribute to it at all.  Obviously fully contributing to 
> collaboration would be ideal, but isn't partial collaboration better than 
> none at all?  Without trading patches, it looks like "none at all" wins by 
> default.  Unfortunately, that "winning" option is a lose-lose scenario.

That would be true if Transgaming was the only company out there. But
since it's not, we will actually win more by having as much code under
the LGPL as possible, since this will maximize the amount of code we
receive from all other present and future companies, as opposed to
getting just a single patch today. In the long run the LGPL will do a
lot more good to Wine than Transgaming's code; but this will only be
true if we can reach a critical mass of code under the LGPL. And any
piece of code that is relicensed under X11 reduces the chance of
reaching that critical mass.

> This is a separate question of whether the specific trade he proposed is 
> a fair one.  If you don't think it is, demand something better -- that's 
> perfectly reasonable.  You could require (for example) that the current COM 
> code be release AND the next version as well.  You could even insist on a 
> written commitment from Transgaming to release all future versions of that 
> COM code to the LGPL codebase.  Whatever makes it worthwhile and fair (to 
> both parties)...

But if Transgaming was willing to commit to making future versions
free then they could just as well adopt the LGPL code without
requiring any further negotiation. So the fact that they want these
negotiations shows that they have already rejected the option that
could be the basis for what I would consider a fair trade.

> Negotiating is one thing -- refusing to negotiate on principle is something 
> else entirely.  You can do it, sure.  But what does that gain you?

I'm not refusing at all, I have repeatedly said that I'm willing to do
all necessary efforts to make things work for Transgaming if they are
willing to change to a more open source model. But I have no interest
in negotiating on the patch-by-patch basis that Gav has proposed,
because it does absolutely nothing to address the very serious
problems I see with Transgaming's model. And despite the fact that I
have been saying this to him for a long time now, Gav has shown no
intention at all to try to address this issue. That's why I prefer to
spend my time writing code, instead of wasting even more time trying
to make Gav give us something that I know he doesn't want to give, no
matter how much we could offer in exchange.

> If you make a trade or several, and it seems like your worst fears are 
> coming to pass, then you can always use that to justify a policy change to 
> refuse future trading of patches, or to require even higher standards to 
> consider them.

My worst fears are already coming to pass, which is the whole point
about the change. DirectX development has been dead for more than a
year now, and all the enthusiasm there was for running games with Wine
a couple of years ago has evaporated. That's a very serious harm, and
while it's too late to do anything about DirectX I don't want that to
happen to other parts of the code.

Go read Dimitrie's analogy about children. Would you let someone hurt
your children even if they gave you a lot of money for that?  Would
you be willing to even start negotiating a price?  There is simply no
amount of money or code that Transgaming can offer me to convince me
to make it easier for others to hurt a project that I have now spent 9
years of my life working on. If they want to use my code in a way that
actually helps the project instead of harming it, they can do it just
fine under the terms of the LGPL, they don't need to negotiate a
special permission. The reason they need the special permission is
that they don't want to promise that they won't use my code in ways
that harm the project; and I'm not interested in letting them use it
under these terms.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
[email protected]