RSSParallels Says Wine Was Given Modified LGPL Code
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 2, 2007, 6:02 PM
After public complaints amassed over what seemed to be reluctance on the part of SWsoft's Parallels division to turn over to open source developers modifications it made to their code, Parallels told BetaNews this afternoon it has done just that.
The caretakers of the Wine library for running Windows applications on Mac OS X now have copies of modified forms of their source code, as the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) mandated that modifiers make available, according to Parallels.
Parallels' director of corporate communications Benjamin Rudolph told BetaNews this afternoon that the apparent delay is the result of a misunderstanding between the requesting parties and the companies' engineers who were adapting the code. Quite possibly, the fact that the original inquiry by a Wine engineer came on a public forum where he only identified himself as unused_user_name, didn't help much.
That original request did come at the beginning of June, though, and has only been fulfilled just within the past few days. "We didn't get it over to them as fast as they would like," Rudolph said. "It's a case of some people wanting things now." He later added it's not always possible for a small corporation to grant such a request within 24 hours, though perhaps a one-week span would be more reasonable.
Rudolph reminded us that his company's first major product was a virtualization environment for Linux, and added Parallels has been a long-time supporter of open source. So the notion that just because Parallels is incorporated means it must have some ulterior motive cut to the quick. "I don't want to say it offended me," Rudolph said, "but it kind of hurt. We've done our best to work with all our partners."
He does not anticipate this to be a lingering issue, he added, and warmed up to the idea of Parallels' and Wine's developers working together to solve the minor bugs in the Wine code that led to its discovery as components of Parallels 3.0 for Mac in the first place.
If you're going to use code that is required to be made public if you modify it, then make it public. Don't just use the code and hope nobody notices, and when they do, don't act like you're doing them a favor by releasing what you were REQUIRED to release in the first place.
Trying to defend themselves by saying they didn't know the person's identity who was requesting the code was rather weak. It shouldn't matter who was asking for it, the license clearly states that they're REQUIRED to release it. Like I said, the code should have been released even without anyone explicitly asking for it.
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My guess is that they would have been real nice if he had identified himself upfront, but they were dismissive since they thought he was some no-name programmer.
They dropped the ball, certainly. Taking a month to respond? Maybe someone should explain to Rudolph concepts of how to do things like forward requests and that sending emails and such can only take seconds, not a month.
They used LGPL code, modified it, waited until someone noticed it, and then weren't sure what to do when someone actually asked for the modified code? Retards. Don't use a license in your programs unless you know how it affects you and that you're ready to meet its demands.
I think the accusation is merely that Parallels was dishonest in the use of a license, nothing to do with it being incorporated.
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What morriscox said! Most free software is commercial software, so that's never been an impediment under the GPL.
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