On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 05:41:08PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote: > On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 12:37:53PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: > > I believe that having Win98 freely available for anyone who wants to use > > it reduces the pool of people who want to *develop* Wine, because there > > is non-free software satisfies their needs as they themselves presently > > understand them. > > The hypothetical situation involved it being released under a non-free > license. > > I agree that if it was distributed with all relevant freedoms, no one > would need to implement something free to support its interfaces.
Even if it was released under a non-free license, some people might hold off developing wine because one could just as well use the original DLLs and get Win32 programs to run. If Windows would suddenly become Free Software, this issue would become trivial, of course[1]. I think this point was a bit further illustrated by the Transgaming example Steve provided in his post. Michael -- [1] Now, Microsoft would have to split off all 3rd party code in order to relicense Windows, right?. /me wonders how much would be left then...
