[Gllug] Civilization for Linux

[Doug Winter]

On Thu 06 Feb Tethys wrote:
> 
> Andrew Halliwell writes:
> 
> >Does this mean that Transgaming have taken a GPL project (wine),
> >produced WineX and have placed restrictions on its distribution
> >in a totally non-gpl compliant way?
> 
> No. What they've done is perfectly legal. It's just not ethical or
> (IMHO) a good idea. So I'm not prepared to support it. It essentially
> highlights one of the dangers of BSD-like licensing. Anyone can fork
> a proprietary branch (which is what Transgaming have done). In this
> case, they've added better support for DirectX, and aren't submitting
> the changes back into the Wine tree. Consequently, people are being
> discouraged from adding the support to Wine, because "it already exists,
> just use WineX instead". That's harming the Wine project as a whole
> (and was the driver behind the change to LGPL licensing).

An interesting point.  

I'm not sure I would agree that it is unethical though - surely the
point of the BSD license is specifically to *allow* this kind of thing.
If the developers had wanted to restrict the use of the code further,
they would presumably have gone for a more restrictive license, like the
GPL.  

There are many definitions of software freedom, and a significant chunk
of the BSD community consider GPL to be very un-free because if it's
considerable restrictions.

Also, I'd be horrified if free software developers really were
discouraged from doing something because non-free software already did
it.  Since WINE is in fact a Windows Emulator it seems odd that they
would take this stance, since their entire effort is to replicate
non-free software already?

doug.

-- 
http://www.ubergeek.tv/switchlinux/

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