Re: WineX and the AFPL

At 04:01 PM 5/31/02 -0400, Deven T. Corzine wrote:

<snipped a lot of good points>

I think the whole issue is that the license change was conducted in a 
hastily way. There where some reasons for that, one of them is that the 
real coders didn't want to spend too much time discussing licenses but 
preferred to code instead. So most agreed on the LGPL because that seemed 
to fit best in the current situation.

Personally, I still don't know if it was a good choice. All that I know is 
that both the X11 and the LGPL license have arguments in their favour.

I think in an ideal world people would sit down, brainstorm and try to make 
a custom-tailored license for wine. The wine-conf would have been a good 
opportunity for that, but for some reason they wanted the license switch 
before it happened.

Now the problem is, that people don't have time or don't want to use their 
time for long license discussions. Most think that the LGPL will do just fine.

The bad thing is that we will probably never know if it was a good decision 
because it seems that the X11 fork will basically die...So we won't be able 
to compare X11 and LGPL.

It was different in the X11-project. There was a large community supporting 
it and so it was strong enough to outgrow any commercial competition. So 
again I don't know if it is fair to compare the X11-project with WINE. I 
think WINE is just a different case with different circumstances, so what 
worked well for X11 wouldn't necessary work well with WINE, although it 
MIGHT work well with WINE also...

Just my 0.05$

Roland