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

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:

> On May 8, 2002 07:11 pm, Ove Kaaven wrote:
> 
> > I'm willing to agree that there will be few platforms and uses of Wine
> > that will suffer in practice, but I have never been willing to sacrifice
> > *any* use of Wine no matter how small. For all I care, the LGPL may make
> > good business sense, make us all richer than Bill Gates, and get us all
> > the code in the world, but it's *still* wrong to prohibit some uses of the
> > code, like non-modular adaption of the code for use on low-power embedded
> > systems, just because such use is not something we wanted to think about.
> > So ReWind will continue to exist.
> 
> Sorry Ove,
> 
> And I *still* maintain this is just crap. By this reasoning, MS's arguments
> that it's impossible to create a modular Windows is right on the mark. But it's not.

Well, whatever. It's not like MS would have licensing troubles however
they structured their code.

>   -- yet again, say we have such a dog, and a tiny portion of the users do use it.
> And with the function call in place, it's gonna be 1% slower. So what??? Meantime,
> the 99.99999999999% of the users suffer for year because the main Wine will
> be behind (even if by a fraction) because enormously talented people like Eric
> and yourselves (among others) are burning most of your free cycles on work that
> might benefit 0.0000001% percent of the users by an increase in efficiency on
> their platforms of a fraction of a percent.

So you're saying Wine will suffer because there will be some developers
that spend their time on maintaining ReWind instead of submitting patches
to Wine. And here I thought one of the good LGPL arguments was that it
would attract *more* developers, and that the benefits would outweigh
those lost (like Wine suddenly lost Gerard Patel after the license
switch). And still having some people not even working on the "right"
patches (not just holding code back, but not even writing stuff you need)
is a fatal blow to Wine and its users. I guess you're saying the LGPL
switch wasn't such a good idea after all, then? (As in, there are still
several good reasons left standing, but one of them lost?)

If you have that perspective, perhaps you should really be happy, as you
might now get LGPL-hostile people like Gerard Patel submitting patches to
ReWind, which you could then use to improve Wine.

But thank you for giving me this argument - the more people that license
their patches under the X11, the more *new* code can be written by the
ReWind developers that would be useful for Wine as well.