Re: WineX and the AFPL

On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Roger Fujii wrote:
[...]
> You are missing my point.  Let's say Brett Glass posted a fix to Rewind.
> I think it's fair to say that he would NOT want his patches in the LGPL wine
> tree.  In the context that there are competing projects trying to show
> which methodology is better (this is key), using his patches would be
> tantamount to 'stealing' (it is _only_ a theft in this context).  And if you
> read what I said, I did not accuse ANYONE of this 'stealing'.

If Brett Glass does not want his patch to be used by Wine then he should
*not* release it under the X11 license. And yes that means Brett Glass
*cannot* contribute to ReWind.

Anyone who does not want his code to be used in Wine does *not* believe
in the X11 and 2-clause BSD licenses. You cannot both claim that the X11
and 2-clause BSD licenses are the right thing to do (I give my code away
to all without expecting anything in return), and at the same time
forbid the Wine project from using your code.

Any person who does not want their code to be used in Wine should thus
start their own fork of the source and release it (or not) under a
different license. They could keep it proprietary, release it under the
AFPL, the 3-clause BSD license or one of many other licenses.

But I am willing to bet that they would find very few other people
willing to contribute to their fork. This is why Transgaming is asking
people to give their LGPL patches to the X11 tree and not directly to
their AFPL or proprietary tree. They know full well that no-one would
relicense their LGPL patches under the AFPL or Transgaming's proprietary
license.

Transgaming will not contribute to ReWind either. This is because *now*
they realize that anything they give to an X11 tree others can take
without giving anything back. And they don't want that, never did. This
is just like they just recently realized that they did not like the AFPL
license either because it allows others, e.g. Debian, to distribute
binaries that they feel are too close to their commercial code for
comfort. But somehow they still think they can have their cake (get code
from ReWind, pretend to be somewhat open with the AFPL), while eating it
too (prevent others from using their code i.e. not giving back to
ReWind, forbid binary redistribution despite using the AFPL).

The sooner they realize that this is impossible, the better for them,
for ReWind and for Wine.

--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
May your Tongue stick to the Roof of your Mouth with the Force of a Thousand Caramels.