Re: WineX and the AFPL

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Roland wrote:

> 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.

I'd hate for that to happen.  There's already a proliferation of way too 
many licenses that are substantially similar, but people always seem to 
feel the need to make Yet Another License.  Making a new license should be 
a last resort if none of the existing licenses available are appropriate...

Was the MPL considered?  It might not have been a bad choice...

> 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.

This is why you can't decide which license is better by watching to see if 
Wine or ReWind does better.  The Wine leadership decided to change the Wine 
license and the project direction, and lacking a compelling reason, most of 
the developers are likely to follow that lead and focus on the LGPL license 
without much concern for the X11 license.  In the end, whichever codebase 
has the stronger developer community is likely to "win", regardless of 
which license that community is using.

> 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...

Well, if Wine could get to a 1.0 release (suitable for Joe Sixpack), there 
would probably form a much larger community than now exists.  X11 didn't 
build such a large community during year after year of "developers-only" 
releases, but by being used in production worldwide.  The need is there; is 
it such a stretch to imagine that a larger, stronger community will form 
once the code is "ready for prime time"?

A more interesting question is what would have happened if X11 had always 
used the LGPL license instead of its own license.  Would it have become an 
industry standard and attracted so much support?  Perhaps not.  (Although 
Wine does have the advantage of limited competition, since implementing the 
Windows APIs is harder than just making a windowing system of some sort...)

Deven