[Fsfe-uk] Interesting license debate on wine's mailing list

[Martyn Ranyard]

Hi all, I know this is a tad off-topic, but reading the Kernel Cousin Wine, 
this morning, I found some very interesting discussion, and thought people 
on this list might be interested - I found the CPL idea very interesting 
indeed.

Martyn

<snippet from kc-wine follows>

14 Feb - 24 Feb (3 posts) Archive Link: News

First, a big oops on my part. I submitted the last issue to Zack with a large
section on the Wine licensing debate. However, Zack received a few different
copies of the issue from me and the final one didn't have that story in it! It
seems an XML faux pas on my part seems to have messed up the parser. I've
updated issue #115 to include it, please go back and check it out: Issue #115,
Section #2 (6 Feb: "Wine License Change, Round 2")

With the creation of the new wine-license (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/
wine-license) list all future mailing list stats will include both wine-devel
and wine-license. This will be done by simply concatenating the two lists
before counting them. The side effect will be anything that is cross-posted
will be counted twice, however I don't think that matters too much.

The issue of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has come up a few times in the
recent license debate. Yahoo carried a Reuters article this week titled
"Grateful Dead Lyricist Condemns New Copyright Law" (http://
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020224/tc_nm/tech_copyright_dc_3&
cid=581). It treats the subject fairly lightly while presenting both sides of
the argument.

There's also an update (http://www.lindows.com/lindows_michaelsminutes.php)
over on Lindows.com about their legal dispute with Microsoft. There's a link
(http://www.net2.com/lindows/survey.pdf) to an interesting survey they
conducted. Michael Robertson [*] declares the survey shows "not even a SINGLE
respondent was confused" between Microsoft's programs and LindowsOS. Then again
the survey population of 14,001 consisted of people who registered on
Lindows.com's website.

2. Wine Licensing (con't)

14 Feb - 24 Feb (422 posts) Archive Link: License change vote results

Did you see the above note about missing the license debate in the last issue?
Please go back and check out that thread: Issue #115, Section #2 (6 Feb: "Wine
License Change, Round 2") This section picks up from there.

The license debate continues. This week I'll summarize it first by looking at a
few posts by Alexandre. Then we'll move on to the various threads.

The whole thread took a turn when Alexandre posted the following message:

    Folks,

    Here is the summary of the votes I received in answer to the request to
    switch to a copyleft-style license:

                        Agree     Disagree  Indifferent

    All votes:          76 (70%)  15 (14%)  17 (16%)

    Contributors:       39 (66%)  7 (12%)   13 (22%)

    Contrib. weighted:  59 (64%)  13 (14%)  20 (22%)

    The first line counts all the votes I received. The second line counts the
    votes of all people/companies who contributed some code to the 
project. The
    last line counts all contributors again but with each being given 1, 2, or
    3 votes depending on the importance of his contributions (this evaluation
    is obviously a bit subjective, but I think the overall trend is clear).

    The obvious result of this vote is that my previous conclusion was wrong:
    there is clearly widespread support in the community for a copyleft-style
    license. With 2 out of 3 contributors in favor of the switch, and less 
than
    15% opposed to it, it's clear that we are going to proceed with the 
change.

    We now have to decide the implementation details, like the exact license
    used, whether to require copyright assignments, etc. My suggestion is that
    we create a separate mailing list to discuss that, to avoid drowning
    wine-devel under yet another license flame war.

Roger Fujii [*] wondered, "As a curiosity, what % of the voters are affiliated
with codeweavers?" Alexandre explained, "Actually I have counted Codeweavers
and its employees as one contributor. Only people who have done work for
themselves outside of Codeweavers have been counted separately. The total of
all these votes represents about 10% of the contributors votes (and about 5%
for Transgaming in case you wondered)."

At this point a new mailing was created, wine-license. You can find all of the
Hypermail archives (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-license) on the WineHQ
web site. Most of the discussion shifted over there within a few days.

With regards to the existing code, Kenneth Davis [*] asked, "Will there be a
final release of the X11 tree previously maintained by Alexandre Julliard [*]?
(for those of us who do not wish to use a version under another license)."
Alexandre replied he would cut a final release under the BSD license before
making the change. Kenneth also wondered if someone would be willing to
maintain the BSD tree to which Ove Kåven responded, "If it proves necessary,
I'd be happy to. I know I will not contribute to a LGPL-only Wine; I don't care
much about business models, but if the Wine project will not allow my work to
be used in someone's Xbox clone with NDA-ed hardware specs and operating
environment (i.e. hardware-specific changes to the Wine core with no disclosure
allowed), then I'm not interested in contributing to the Wine project at all."

Patrik Stridvall [*] felt it was too early to think about how the two trees
will co-exist since the only thing that had been decided was "that we should
explore the possibillities for some sort of copyleft license". Alexandre
clarified that, "What has been decided is that we *will* switch to a copyleft
license. Right now the LGPL is the obvious favorite, judging from the responses
I got (even though the question was about copyleft, a large proportion of the
voters explicitly said they favored LGPL). I'm open to alternative solutions
though, and you are welcome to make *constructive* propositions of other
possible licenses.".

With that in mind, Andriy Palamarchuk [*] wrote:

    I want to start this thread to discuss advantages and disadvantages of 
MPL.

    Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, do not consider myself an expert in licenses

    For the text of the license see http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html
    (http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html)

    I reviewed MPL - it seems to fit very well to our goals. This is a 
copyleft
    license.

    Can we use the conclusions they came to - licensing under tri-license MPL/
    LGPL/GPL?

Alexandre replied, "The main problem with multiple licenses is that as soon as
someone actually uses the extra permissions, by doing something allowed by LGPL
but not by MPL, or allowed by MPL but not by LGPL, this creates a fork that can
never be merged back into the main tree. So it sorts of defeats the purpose of
copyleft."

Andriy wrote back with:

    Found RMS comments about compatibility of NPL/MPL with GPL: http://
    www.gnu.org/philosophy/netscape-npl.html (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
    netscape-npl.html)

    The article says thag GPL is incompatible with NPL(MPL) because NPL has
    additional restrictions and conditions. What he exactly means?

    The article has many concerns which are applicable to Wine.

It should be noted that because of potential incompatibilities of the MPL and
GPL licenses the Mozilla project decided to adopt the GPL/LGPL/MPL licenses
just to make sure the MPL code could be shared with GPL'ed projects. Anand
Kumria [*] summarized some key features of using the MPL:


      + allows integration with xGPL projects (i.e. Gaelon/Skipstone)
      + forces modifications made to the core code to be contributed back
      + allows proprietary additions (i.e. Netscape's stuff)
      + may also allow TransGaming's model to continue
      + (downside) also means each file has to contain a lot of licence guff

The next thread was started by Gerhard Gruber [*], "When I was thinking about
the license issues discussed here I was thinkg about wxWindows. As it seems
there may be similarities, because wxWindows is also a library that can be used
in commecrial applications. Maybe if somebdoy looks into the licenses of
wxWindows it might help."

Andriy looked into and reported, "Their choice is pretty interesting. Quote
from the site: "The wxWindows 2 licence is essentially the L-GPL (Library
General Public Licence), with an exception stating that derived works in binary
form may be distributed on the user's own terms. This is a solution that
satisfies those who wish to produce GPL'ed software using wxWindows, and also
those producing proprietary software.""

Andriy also gave a link to GPL-compatible licenses approved by the Free
Software Foundation: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#
GPLCompatibleLicenses (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#
GPLCompatibleLicenses).

Deven Corzine [*] tossed out another idea. This follows on the idea of creating
a "WineCorp" entity that had been suggested before - namely a controlling group
would be able to sell a proprietary license to anyone that wanted one. Deven's
example showed how Sleepycat Software worked:

    Berkeley DB started as a small embedded database library which only
    supported hash tables and btrees. Since it was written for BSD Unix as a
    replacement, it was released under the BSD license. After a few years, it
    was widely used, but it still only offered access methods. When Netscape
    wanted more features, such as transactions, disaster recovery and
    multiple-user support, Sleepycat Software was founded to further develop
    Berkeley DB (on the strength of a licensing deal with Netscape).

    The new version of the software was released under the Sleepycat license
    [sleepycat.com], an OSI-approved [opensource.org] license which allows 
Open
    Source applications to use Berkeley DB, but (unlike the GPL) appears to be
    compatible with any Open Source license. For proprietary applications,
    Sleepycat offers a more traditional licensing option to companies who 
don't
    wish to distribute their source code. Revenue from such licensing funds
    additional development of Berkeley DB, to the benefit of all. (For 
example,
    Berkeley DB 4.x adds replication and high-availability functionality that
    surely would not exist without the funding received through this dual
    licensing.)

    Perhaps the Wine project should follow this example? Wine could be placed
    under a license like Sleepycat's, which would allow Wine to be freely used
    by Open Source projects (whether GPL or not), and proprietary companies
    could pay for a license which allows proprietary use. Funding from such
    licensing could be used to further develop Wine, to the benefit of
    proprietary and Open Source users alike.

Several people pointed out that putting all of the control into the hands of a
few people didn't seem like a good idea.

At different times people asked for a clarification of exactly what was to be
accomplished by using a copyleft license. The hope was that by defining the
goals perhaps the best match could be found with existing licenses. Andriy
provided a list and several people commented on it. The second revision was:


     1. Get all the modifications to our code back (copyleft license).
     2. Allow reimlementation of any call of Windows API under different
        license
     3. Allow products under different license to link against Wine
     4. GPL, LGPL compatibility
     5. protection agains patent claims

    The only point contested was #2. Dan Kegel [*] suggested something like,


        Allow proprietary programs to dynamically link to any set of DLLs from
        Wine; they should be able to mix and match Wine DLLs with their own
        proprietary ones.

    .

    Bob La Quey [*] broke the problem down systematically and approached the
    problem from a different point of view:

    First the disclaimers: I am an outsider to the Wine community but my
    company OsoComm see http://www.osocomm.com/ has recently done some 
contract
    work for Lindows.com. I anticipate that we will be quite active in this
    community during the next year and so I am reading the mail archives,
    studying the technology and generally trying to come up to steam so that
    OsoComm can be a good member of this community. Oh yes also IANAL and
    personally favor the GPL.

    Now a comment on the licenses:

    The BSD vs xGPL debate is really very simple.

    First I will define three groups. Call them PA, PB and C where:
        PA = Programmers who see no need to earn money from writing code under
        the license.
        PB = Programmers who wish to have at least a chance to earn money from
        their code.
        C = for profit companies investing in software development.

    xGPL says you MUST give code back to the community, PAs tend to like this
    license, PBs do not. BSD says you MAY give code back but you are not 
forced
    to do so, PAs do not like this, PBs do, and C's do.

    It appears that all groups would agree to the principal that having source
    code available would generally be a good thing if their economic interest
    were not threatened. The puzzle then is how to arrange this.

    I propose a single license, call it the CPL for Compromise Public License.

    The CPL is a function of one variable Time. So we have CPL(T), where T 
is a
    period of time allowed before the source code MUST be revealed.
        CPL(T=0) = GPL
        CPL(T=infinity) = BSD.

    T is essentially the time at which the license switches from BSD to GPL,
    i.e. the delay between the release of a binary and the release of the code
    for that binary.

    The resolution to the conflict is to use T to balance the needs of
    investors of either time (programmers) or money (companies) with the needs
    of the community for open source.

    This is the same idea as copyright but under the "Sonny Bono Copyright 
Term
    Extension Act" copyright now has T=70+ years, which for software is 
absurd.
    If you look into the history of copyright you will find that Jefferson was
    initially ( See http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/bplist/archive/
    1999-02-11$2.html (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/bplist/archive/
    1999-02-11$2.html) ) opposed to it. He was a GPL guy, but Madison 
convinced
    him that allowing a monopoly to the creator for a limited time was a fair
    way to balance the needs of the creators and the community. I think some
    200 years later this remains the best solution.

    But we need a reasonable T.

    I think a T of six months to one year is probably about right, with six
    months better then one year. This gives investing companies an opportunity
    to recover their investment and still insures that the community gets the
    code, albeit a little bit later then they do under the conventional GPL.

There weren't very many responses to the idea by the time I kicked this issue
out the door. So, there we are - a new license is in the works. Stay tuned.

<snippet ends>


Martyn Ranyard
Free Software Advocate