The issue between WINE and Parallels has been solved. "On July 2nd, Parallels sent the modified sources to me (Stefan Dosinger). I looked at them, and they are functionally mostly unmodified, except of some changes to get wined3d to compile on Windows(nameless unions, and similar things). What is yet to be verified is if these are the sources used to build the libs shipped in Parallels Desktop for Mac."
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Member since:2006-01-25
"yes, we used wine sources, however, we need to seperate the LGPL code from out own to ensure that we don't disclose proprietary third party or our own code".
Well if they said that, wouldn't they be in violation of the LGPL? If they added their own proprietary code to the LGPL library, then that code now must be released under the LGPL if they ever redistributed the said binary. Proprietary code that they do not want released must not be part of the same library as per the LGPL. If these sources were NOT used to build the distributed library and they took stuff out of them before they provided them, they are still violating the license.
There are other, more valid excuses for needing to seperate code out, such as if they for some weird reason, do not have a snapshot of the source for the version released and have to dig that up to provide the source, that is a much more valid reason (ie, they added a new feature to the library and want to surprise everyone else with it when they release the new version of the program using the library)
Member since:2005-07-06
If you think that, then obviously you know next to nothing about the LGPL and the purpose of it; may I suggest that you research into a little more.
You can link against it, but in regards to the 'seperation' - I'm not sure how big of a mess their code is, but given how craptacular some companies are, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some ugly hacks involved.
At the end of the day, the issue has been resolved. and it been much ado about nothing; then again, wine having been screwed over once by software vendors in the past, don't want a repeat of the same situation again - it was outlets like osnews.com and so forth which turned a mole hill into a mountain.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Still, Parallels likely should have mentioned wine in the doc and how to get the source.
Excuse me, stop using FUD unless you actually *know* what it means - simply throwing it around removes any possible real impact of it when used in a real situation later on.
Regarding the issue at hand, they had over a month to resolve the situation - if they were investigating it, they should have mentioned it, if they were working on it, they should have mentioned it.
The problem with businesses is that they *FAIL* to communicate - they need to openly communicate and say, if they are going to take a x number of days, they should disclose that "yes, we used wine sources, however, we need to seperate the LGPL code from out own to ensure that we don't disclose proprietary third party or our own code".
This is just the tip of the iceburg; you get the same situation with Apple, Sun, and many other organisations - they need to disclose "this is where we are, this is where we're going - this is who we're partnered with, this is what we've used from the opensource community" - being secret squirl about this just brings to the forefront all sorts of conspiracy theories, and quite frankly companies involved only have themselves to blame.