Re: Problem with InstallShield (Was Re: [Bug 629] Changed - Problem with InstallShield: ole:CoTreatAsClass(stub), ole:CoGetClassObject)

On Thu, 9 May 2002 [email protected] wrote:

> Okay, let's take a practical look at this.

Exactly the flaw of the LGPL arguments. Not thinking about theoretical
possibilities means not thinking about future possibilities. Don't make
that mistake.

> Those closed-sourced drivers are considered 'part of the operating
> system', so making a port.c depend on them to access proprietory OS
> and System components is totally allowed.

The LGPL makes no special exemption for 'part of the operating system'.
Only the GPL does (the reasons for this was discussed earlier), but that
exemption only allows linking against such libraries, not embedding NDA-ed
code straight into Wine, which I was talking about. As mentioned before, I
agree that this hardly matters in most "practical" cases, but there are
always the cases neither you nor I could anticipate.

> then you should have picked an operating system that doesn't require
> low-level driver linking. And in fact, I can think of no circumstance
> that would.

In other words, you think it's ok to prohibit Wine running on some classes
of operating systems, just because you can't think of any we may want to
do it on. This fits perfectly well my statement "but it's *still* wrong to
prohibit some uses of the code, just because such use is not something we
wanted to think about." No single human can think of every circumstance
that may arise in the future, and I don't claim to know any such
circumstance, but it's too likely that one will appear for me to abandon
the fork.