wine users - Jun 2012 - Wine Licensing with regards to use in Companies

Hey All,

Have searched both forums and FAQ and have read the Licensing stuff on the site,
but can't seem to get a definitive answer, so here goes.

My company recently switched over to Ubuntu 11.10 as their main OS from Windows
7. Unfortunately, most of the tools available us plebs on the floor, to actually
do our jobs, are not compatible with Linux.

I recently suggested that I.T. allow the installation of Wine to enable us to
actually do what is requested of us. I got the response that we would be unable
to as "it would be a breach of licensing contract. Wine can only have one
license per company."

Now, as far as I understand it, licensing is not an issue when it comes to Wine
and what I've received is essentially a PFO.

So, what I'm looking for is confirmation that this is just crap and that the
Lesser General Public License confirms this.

Don't worry, not like I'm going to be quoting specific usernames from a
forum to I.T., but if I had confirmation that the LGPL says there's not an
issue, I would have a much stronger case.

Thanks in advance.

you may have misunderstood the reasoning, or is that an exact quote?  I see
nothing in the LGPL that says anything like that.  I LGPL my own code for
Wineskin, which uses Wine and many other things like xorg and such to be able to
make Mac ports of software, and companies even use and sell their software with
this... which is perfectly legal.  Generally there is more problems with
software licensing when it comes to selling over just using.

You should be able to use Wine fine and legally on your machines, but it depends
how well it works for the software your using in Wine, and what the licensing
terms of the software is that your needing to run in Wine.  The biggest obstacle
I could think of usually comes down to licensing and support of the software
requiring certain things, like running on certain versions of Windows etc... and
not with Wine, but this has nothing to do with Wine licensing.