Wine license change, Feb 07, 2002

However, with some recent events I cannot disclose, it is clear to me that the opportunity for Wine to be used in a proprietary product is too tempting and has caused some harm to the Wine project. Based on experience, I feel strongly that the potential for harm is great enough that CodeWeavers needs to take two actions. First, we would like to release all new code we develop under an LGPL style license. Second, I would like to open another call for a license change and thereby strongly add my voice to Alexandre's.

Before starting though, I would like to ask my readers to forget everything they have heard about .NET, because it is a marketing term used to describe many different Microsoft projects, and there is a lot of information both correct and incorrect about it floating around.

My goals with Mono are very specific, and I will address those shortly, but for the sake of getting things done, please forget everything you have heard about .NET.

GNOME is not adopting Mono or .NET as an implementation technology. The headline from the Register is misleading, for a number of reasons:

Is it true the Google infrastructure is based on Linux (the open-source operating system) running on personal computers?

Yes, it turns out that it's Linux and PCs that are built by hand. Which I find sort of moderately disturbing because, in my career, I've spent 20 years making that not be the correct answer. And yet it turns out that the PC is the best choice because we use desktop components and we have so many PCs that we buy incredibly cheaply. ... And Linux has a number of [advantages], including the fact that all the undergraduates coming out of the top universities now are Linux programmers. And it doesn't cost anything. So it has two things going for it.

Does today's big Linux announcement signal the start of a shift towards Linux and away from Solaris (Sun's version of UNIX)? "Not at all," Mehra replied. "Both SPARC (Sun's processor) and Solaris are continually growing and maturing and getting better. We think we can improve both Linux and Solaris at the same time."

"Linux is expanding the Unix market," Zander said. "We don't want it to fragment... People don't realize how much we've done with Linux and our purpose here is to state our business strategy with Solaris and Linux because there has been a lot in the media that has been incorrect..."

In what it called a three-pronged approach, Sun plans in the future to roll out a full Linux operating system; expand its line of Sun Cobalt Linux appliances and craft a new family of low-end Linux/x86-based systems; and endear itself to the Linux community by offering developers code to its Solaris operating environment software.

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