At 06:48 PM 2/13/2002, David Elliott wrote: >The main problem with LGPL is that once we go there we can never go back.
I agree. >Wine cannot stay X11 free-for-all forever. Why not? BSD has. X11 has. Apache has. >Reminds me of one of Roger Ebert's columns about the movie "It's a >Wonderfull Life". Because the movie is now public domain, anyone can >use the original print for whatever purpose. This includes colorizing >it and then selling the colorized version for a lot of cash (thanks >Ted... yeah right). The colorized version is a bastardization of the >movie and is one of those cases where you almost wish that copyrights >didn't expire. Especially considering that the director and the much of >the cast were still alive to see this horrible, horrible thing. I happen to agree, though I don't think it's "horrible" -- just weird. The best thing we can do is vote with our feet and not buy or rent that version. The same would be true of a bad commercial version of WINE. >However, the X11 license has the great advantage that it is extremely >flexible. So flexible that anyone who wanted to could take the tree and >release it under any other license. Actually, no. You can't change the license on existing code. But you can combine it with code that's licensed differently. >Looking at some of the more popular BSD-type licensed projects, many of >them have this sort of non-profit set-up. Apache would be the one that >springs to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others. FreeBSD and NetBSD do as well. But they administer the trademarks and handle contributions; they don't try to restrict access to the code. --Brett
