Two Helpings of WINE

Mister Snee writes: "As of the latest WINE release, the developer who's been working on the ActiveMovie and DirectShow code for the last nine months suddenly pulled it all from the source tree, citing fears of trouble under the DMCA." And an anonymous reader submits: "TransGaming Tecnologies is offering much of its own proprietary code up for exchange if Codeweavers are willing to relicense some of their code under the less restrictive (more free) X11 licence (eg contributing it to the X11 fork of wine, Rewind). Details can be found at this post by CEO Gavriel State. This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money)." Your attitude toward these license machinations may vary; Codeweavers seems unlikely to oppose people making money from WINE development.

What's the last tarball with the code?

[acceleriter]

I have to add a copy to my "suppressed" directory tree. This is just what the WINE project needs. A fork to a non-U.S. (and probably non-E.U., eventually) nation brought on by the mere implied threat of legal action from evil "intellectual" "property" barons.

Re:WINE == DEAD END?

[morningdave]

I don't know that it's necessarily a dead end, just because the cutting edge apps aren't running from Day 1. I have been very interested (and impressed) by the efforts of companies like both CodeWeavers and Transgaming to use this codebase to produce products that allow people to run common Windows apps under Linux. In particular (sorry if this sounds like an ad), CrossOver office is very impressive.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of office documents out there, and if we're going to see more linux desktops (the need for which is a separate argument, not taken up here), people will need to be able to read and save documents in those formats. CrossOver Office allows you to do that very well for Office 97 and 2000. The fact that it doesn't support Office XP isn't too big a deal in my book, at elast from a business perspective. Office compatibility issues exist even at companies that are primarily Windows shops. I work for a major cable shopping channel (yes, that one), and we're still running NT4 and using Office 97. Our case is a bit extreme, but the fact remains that large companies simply aren't able to deploy the latest versions of Microsoft's office tools as soon as they come out. In fact, it's downright bad practice to deploy any Microsoft software in a business environment until a Service Pack or two is released (and many -myself included- would say I should have stopped that sentence after the word 'environment'). If WINE and projects based on it are even able to stay consistently one generation behind in their support for Office and such apps (and I think they'll do much better than that), they will have successfully addressed a major issue with getting companies to migrate from Windows to Linux. Of course, this doesn't help the home user who wants to be able to get at Office XP documents or play the latest games today, but we linux folks are a bunch of do-it-yourselfers anyway. That's why the source is available :)

I just hope that folks at both companies (and any that should follow suit later) can keep sight of the bigger picture and not kill the project with petty licensing squabbles. There must be some way to remain commercially viable *and* return code to the WINE project. It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

The claim of the LGPL's effect is bogus anyway

[Bruce Perens]

The LGPL does not prevent proprietary additions the way the GPL does. They can be static linked, too. So it would not do anything to the Direct3D work. And the "stealing" claim is entirely specious.

If the WINE team wants to avoid leeches, they need some more license consultation.

Bruce

This story is completely bogus!

[Bruce Perens]

The LGPL does not prevent proprietary software. It doesn't even prevent it from being static-linked! It doesn't prevent anyone from making their money. It doesn't prevent them from implementing closed DRM schemes. The whole premise of the story is invalid. here!

Bruce

Re:LGPL.

[Laven]

One of Transgaming's primary reasons for their inability to use the LGPL is because of their copy protection code. They say that it would violate the DMCA if it were released, and it touches so many places of the Wine code that it would be extremely difficult to cleanly seperate into another library.

I personally support Open Source, but it seems that the problem here is the stupid US law and not entirely Transgaming.

What about this case?

Re:Who is the guilty one?

[Surak]

I can't believe I'm arguing with Bruce Perens but here goes:

Not exactly. BSD lets you modify the BSD code and then redistribute it under a proprietary license. Or even distribute the unmodified BSD code under a proprietary license.

With LGPL, proprietary code can statically link to the LGPL code, but you can't modify the LGPL code and close the source to that.

In this case, I believe TransGaming wants to modify the (now) LGPLed Wine code so that they can add a copy protection scheme. Under BSD they could do this. Under LGPL, they have to publish any changes they make directly to the LGPLed source. Which of course would be bad for a copy protection scheme. :)