Seeing the news of Apple using DXVK for the their new toolkit rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t think it’s right that corporations can just use your tools and give nothing back.
Given this, I think it’d be a good idea for DXVK to switch to MPL. I think hard copyleft would probably kill the project, but file based is a pretty good compromise in my opinion.
In some ways it’s a hard thing to police because large corporations like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft will always take and even when they do give back sometimes they get back for nefarious reasons. We in the larger community can only keep making these packages available to as many people as possible, and be vigilant about the tools been dropped behind paywalls.
Switching a license is not a small feat, depending on the license involved, you do have to get permission from all license holders or give them the opportunity to pull their code.
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Apple uses DXVK and their own DirectX 12 to Metal translation layer. VKD3D is not used.
It would be quite difficult to do that now, as they would need the permission of everyone who has code in it.
I guess the question is would Apple have used it if it was under the MPL?
I dont know a damn thing about licenses. How would your change impact other projects? (like bottles, lutris, steam, etc)
With this license in particular, nothing. The license makes it so that if you modify the source code of a file you have to release that source code upon distribution. However, if you don’t modify the source code, you don’t have to release it. This allows it to be packaged with proprietary code, as opposed to the hard copyleft licenses, which are “viral”.
If DXVK were to ship with the GPL license, anything that touches it, even beyond a file level, would have to be open source upon distribution. This would probably kill the project, so that’s why I think MPL is a better option.
It isn’t that easy. Most licenses require everyone who ever contributed to consent to relicensing.
As much as I hate apple, I think anything to dampen Microsoft’s monopoly on gaming is a good thing. And although it sucks that apple isn’t giving anything back, I think in the end this is a good thing. If a game runs on osx through the toolkit, chances are it’ll work on Linux through proton.
I find apple to be parasitic and the definition of a soul less company. That said, is this a net negative for the project? By them giving nothing back is the project any worse off than it was last month? At minimum it should give the project more credibility, but that’s not time or money which I know everyone would prefer. To be clear I am not defending apple, just not sure its worth changing licelses over. PS I know nothing about the licenses so can’t comment much on the differences or merits between each type.
If I understand this correctly, DXVK uses the zlib license. I could see how it is being too permissive, but I am no expert.
They do, which is why Apple was apple to take their code and close it down.
