Re: Linus about GPL x BSD(long)

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Brett Glass wrote:

> At 01:29 PM 7/19/2002, Lionel Ulmer wrote:
> 
> >That's right. Transgaming and Company have poisened the well. 
> 
> No, they have not. They've used a public resource, plus their own
> sweat, to create something good of their own. That's good. But they 
> haven't poisoned the public resource so that no one else can do the
> same, as the GPL fanatics have.
> 
> To poison a public resource *is* evil.

Let's be fair now.  They're roughly equal -- Transgaming made a proprietary 
version of Wine, and now the project leaders have made a different version, 
also proprietary under the LGPL, though less proprietary than the full GPL.
In both cases, the public resource (the X11 version) remains available, but 
is more likely to lag behind the advancements in the proprietary version.

Of course, the proprietary LGPL version is open and available to everyone, 
while the proprietary Transgaming version is closed, so they're not equal 
on that score, but both proprietary versions advance their versions without 
benefit to the X11 version, which is the "public resource" in question...

Nevertheless, the X11 version always remains available, so it hasn't really 
been "poisoned" by anyone -- it's merely been abandoned by the leaders of 
the open project.  (Perhaps not by all contributors, though.)

Deven