Proposal for Trade: COM/DCOM for DLL Seperation

Hi Everyone

As we have mentioned before, TransGaming would like to offer a trade to Wine authors who
have decided to license their code under the LGPL.  We have a number of different
components that we have developed for WineX that are currently not in the LGPLed Wine
tree or the X11-licensed ReWind tree.  We are willing to re-licence some these components
and allow them to be integrated into the public tree, if we can reach an agreement with
current copyright holders of LGPLed code.

As we have stated, we do not believe that it is possible for us to do our work within a
pure LGPLed framework.  This is for a variety of reasons, ranging from concerns about
copy protection issues to working with proprietary platforms.  That having been said,
we would still like to make use of some individual LGPLed DLLs, and we will be very
happy to make any changes we make to those DLLs available under the LGPL as well.

Currently however, we cannot easily take an LGPLed DLL and ship it with WineX due to
changes that have happened in the Wine tree for DLL seperation.  In order for us to
do this, the DLL seperation work that has gone on in the Wine tree would also have to
be made available in the ReWind tree, under the X11 license.

We would like to see the following dll-seperation related patches made
available to ReWind:

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0074.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0111.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0134.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0149.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/05/0011.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/05/0017.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/05/0047.html

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0098.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0112.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0113.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0117.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0118.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0121.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0140.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0150.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/04/0088.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/04/0118.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/04/0167.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/04/0257.html

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0148.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0156.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/04/0159.html

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0081.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0090.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0158.html

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0093.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0104.html

We would also like to see some of the recent async I/O patches made available
by Martin Wilck and Mike McCormack in ReWind, and patches based on that work, ie:

http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0031.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-cvs/2002/03/0041.html

In exchange for this, we're willing to make the following code available to
ReWind (and thus to Wine) under the X11 license:

   - All of the current work in WineX that supports DCOM and InstallShield
     (The WineX version of DCOM and InstallShield support works with
      every InstallShield 6 installer that we've tried)

   - Portions of our copy protection code that are related to low-level
     CD-Reading and reentrant wineserver calls.

   - A 2D DIB rasterization engine with full support for complex brushes and
     ROP modes.  The DIBEngine is configurable from the ~/.wine/config file,
     and coexists with the existing X11drv mechanisms for supporting DIBSections.
     IE: If the DIBSection is in gdimod mode, it will use the X11 primitives,
     and if it is in appmod mode it will use the DIBEngine if the DIBEngine
     supports that primitive.  Our work on the DIBEngine is ongoing.

   - Our up-to-date SDLDrv, the first really useful non-X11 backend driver

   - Various DirectSound improvements

   - A number of other miscellaneous fixes, such as:
    - Support for Gamma ramps in desktop mode
    - WSADuplicateSocket support in WinSock
    - Mousewheel support in DInput
    - Left vs right alt/ctl/shift key mapping
    - DInput keyboard buffering
    - DirectPlay improvements

Some of these changes are already available for viewing on the WineX tree on
SourceForge.  Other parts (ie: the DIB Engine, etc) will be made available for
viewing shortly.

In addition, we'll also be willing to redirect some of our engineering time to
completing any remaining DLL seperation tasks in Wine.  Also, the work we intent to sponsor
to speedup the WineServer will be made available under licenses compatible with both ReWind
and Wine.

We have other things we're willing to trade as well, in exchange for more LGPLed code
being made available to ReWind, or commitments to dual-license other code:

   - New under-development work on DCOM to get away from the current typelib marshalling
     hacks (this will also eliminate some of the visual glitches with InstallShield Installers)

   - XSharedPixmap support in the x11drv.  This vastly improves DIBSection performance
     in some cases, and compliments the DIBEngine work.

   - 3D Sound support in DirectSound

   - Improved support for winelib C++ apps, including msvcrt improvements and
     support for delayed initialization.

Finally, Alexandre has repeatedly charged that the public availability of our WineX
code is discouraging people from contributing games related code to Wine.  If the other
LGPL copyright holders agree that this is a problem, we're willing to consider limiting
the availability of our AFPLed code in some way.  We'll have to figure out exactly how
though.

We look forward to your feedback.

Take care,
   -Gav

-- 
Gavriel State, CEO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
http://www.transgaming.com/
[email protected]