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.

So, just undo the damage.

[Performer Guy]

How can someone pull the code like this? There must be a copy, heck it might even remain in the cvs database, put it back in there, and if the project leads don't want it in then fork the project. This is exactly why we like the license the way it is, so this sort of thing can't be done unilaterally to a project you rely on.

LGPL.

[saintlupus]

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).

Now, I'm not license ninja like some of the people on here, but I thought the whole _point_ of the LGPL was that it could be linked to or used without the linking source having to be opened. I was under the impression that was the main difference between the LGPL (Lesser?) and the regular one.

Anyone care to correct me, please?

--saint

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:DMCA?

[DustMagnet]

I'm just guessing, but I think that this has something to do with Microsoft's Digital Rights Management. The author says, "and there are some other reasons I don't want to write... "

What would be the problem he can't mention? I think the problem he found is an hole in mplayer's DRM. Just recently Microsoft argued before the courts that releasing a full API would let people do bad things [slashdot.org].

Real Media has had this problem for a while. Of course if Microsoft wrote code more professionally this wouldn't be a problem.

Transgaming

[pajor]

This really shows Transgaming's position in the free software / open source worlds. I am a subscriber to Transgaming and have since because of their attitude canceled my subscription. I subscribed because they had an interesting business model and I supported it. When the subscriber base of transgaming reached a certain point (apparently non declared [it used to be on their site some where but I bet they renigged]) then they will release it under a less restrictive license "such as the wine license." I finally read that part over again and noticed that it doesn't actually say anything about what license it will be under, and exactly how less restrictive it will be. The fact that they are negotiating to allow simple trivial things back in to the code base that they have been leeching from for years (such as middle mouse support in DirectX) shows they had no intention of remerging the codebase under the wine license. I can almost guarantee that they will never release their modifications under the wine license now, but rather under some non GPL compatible license.

This is what you get when you trust and give your money to a company founded by ex employees of Corel.

Gnuyen [gnuyen.org]

Who is the guilty one?

[justsomebody]

Transgaming, Codeweavers, Wine or ReWind?

Reading their comments in Wine Magazine 122 or was it 121, I felt like the guilty one is Transgaming. But if you'd examine carefully work Transgaming is dealing with, license forces them to work that way. Some parts they made for WineX like Copy Protection just can't work under base Wine license (same reason as CSS for DVD, which is stupid if you ask me), so all they are asking is making patches available in secondary license which would allow them to push them out closed as demanded by patent.

On the other hand Codeweavers is selling Crossover plugin for a long time and look Quicktime under official Wine license still doesn't work??? I understand they'd sell plugins for browsers, but selling parts of Wine that allow QT to work? That's what exactly what Transgaming was acussed for, just some other parts of system (which are legally closed by patent).

So who is the guilty one?
1. Transgaming for not risking their bussines as demanded from Wine side?
2. Codeweavers for not publishing code for Quicktime to work? Even though Quicktime is not closed by any patent?
3. Wine for being so obviously on Codeweavers side?
4. ReWind for making compromise between all of them but obviously left on the side as a side player nobody really cares about.

I vote for Codeweavers.

"Start" vs. "K"

[autechre]

I work for a university newspaper , and we had some old machines (P-90, 16M RAM) that just wouldn't run Win98 usably. So I decided to make them into X-terminals, since the fileserver (running Samba and netatalk) wasn't really being pushed.

Everything was set up, worked fine. But I only got a few people to use it. I made a big poster with a screenshot of the desktop and hung it right above the machines, but still, little use compared to the Windows machines next to them. People would actually _wait_ to use the Windows machines.

That's when I switched from KDE to icewm. I made icewm have the most Windows-like look possible, giving it a "Start" menu instead of "K." I also put 4 shortcuts on the taskbar next to the Start menu (like Win98) for StarOffice, Netscape, GAIM, and a script that connects them to their PINE email. Then I created a _background_ with arrows pointing to things and descriptions (before, people would just not look up and see the poster). Now I see them being used all the time.

Another thing about a place like this is that the (student) staff changes fairly regularly, and so the new people are more likely to use the Linux machines (though still only if the Windows ones are all taken).

Agree. Also: Merge for Linux.

[aussersterne]

It seems to me that all we'll ever be able to run on Wine is old Windows applications. Any cutting edge applications will not run unless the said app. maintains strict adherence to a old proprietary standard. This means that Wine will always be one step back.

And don't forget that so far, we can't even run old Windows applications using Wine. We're how many years on and I still can't run MS Office 95 or 97 with the latest Wine release, much less Internet Explorer or Photoshop. The recent popularity of the "screw native Linux software, all we need is Wine" mentality is very troubling.

Incedently VMWare and Bochs are not new concepts. SCO have had something called Merge [caldera.com] for ages, which has allowed people to run Windows on Openserver for years now and more recently allowed Unixware users to do the same.

By the way, you can also get Merge for Linux. It's used as the guts of the very popular (and cheaper and faster than VMWare) Win4Lin [netraverse.com].

To encourage free development

[iserlohn]

Note: WineX uses AFPL. Wine uses LGPL, and the old Wine (ReWind) uses X11/MIT

The real reason that the license change was made was that Transgaming has made some really nice improvements and promised more work to be done. They also promised to release most it back to the main WINE tree. So far, only very select portions have been. TG argues that if they released more, there will be no incentives for additional subscribers. Thus, TG has a promise but NO RELEASE DATE for a free versions of their code.

What this does is preempt most of the development in these areas in the main WINE tree. For example if TG is working on improved DirectSound support, and has *promised* to release the code *later*, will you be motivated to work on improved DirectSound support in the main WINE tree? I wouldn't, and that's the problem.

TG has made promises without any dates. They just say that, "Oh we'll release it back when we recover our costs", but it's hurting WINE development by doing that. It's not only encouraging redundant work, it's also hurting the incentive to make a free version (by their empty promises). By changing to LGPL, they are hoping that WINE developers have an incentive to make something that is not preempted by TG (TG has stated it will not release stuff as LGPL).

I used to have WineX subscription, but I cancelled it. I also brought Crossover plugin from CW. Pressing a button on my KVM switch to my windows box is not a big deal. The only reason I subscribed was because I thought that I was contributing to WINE development, and playing games on my Linux box was the added bonus.

Somewhat Interesting

[vinn]

Where was Slashdot when the huge license debate was going on a few months ago? It was far more interesting and from what I remember it got one or two mentions. Also Bruce Perens said something about licensing and possibly "Wine Magazine" getting it wrong - I urge him to go back to issues 111, 115, and 116 of Wine Weekly News - I'm pretty sure I got it right. (If I didn't let me know and I'll include the necessary changes.)

I'd also like to point out that Hidenori Takeshima never cited the DMCA as the reason the code was pulled, although ostensibly it's the only legal reason. For all we know his employer could own some of the code.

Anyway, Gavriel State's proposal is pretty interesting because there hasn't been a major sync with the main (LGPL) Wine CVS in a while. Both sides have a lot to offer. The DLL separation is very important to Transgaming - without it their work will become horribly out of sync. Likewise, the DIB engine and DCOM code would be nice stuff to have in the main Wine tree. (Although, if you read closely it says "current work in WineX that supports DCOM" - according to Ove Kaaven he's work on some new and improved stuff that will make the "current work" obsolete. Perhaps his new stuff has already hit the WineX tree and I'm wrong, but my hunch says they haven't finished it yet.)

Has anyone ever heard of a BSD and LGPL project
trading patches back and forth? I'm sure example exist, perhaps some of the Linux and FreeBSD drivers have worked that way in the past.

The license change worked tho.

[Ndr_Amigo]

This debate has been going on for a while. As other people have commented, the LGPL change was prompted mostly because some companies were promising to release code back, and never substantially doing so. The X11 license allows this, and indeed it is sometimes needed to have closed-source portions in a project the size of WINE. And Transgaming does indeed have to have SOMETHING to pitch it's product for.

Now, the point is that this idea has worked. Gav has now proposed 'trading' some substantial parts of code for duel-licensing certain patches made recently. This shows that the change to the LGPL has helped with it's original aim - encouraging users of the main WINE tree to submit their works off the tree back.

However you look at it, there is no perfect license. The LGPL offers (imho) a good ballance between open source and allowing the closed-source parts that are indeed necessary for WINE to be able to implement certain patent-protected functionality. Basically, this is just FUD of the upmost. There has been no major split in the development community over this, and indeed a majority of WINE commiters have allowed their work to be duel-licensed and commited to both the main WineHQ tree and the x11-forked ReWind tree. Some do not wish that, but that's their own choice. If you spend time coding something, you can damn well do with it what you want ;)

The same of course applies to TG - they spent time coding some very substantial features, and wish to hold their work back. I think decent code exchanges are fine, and this license change has indeed promoted them.