Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[LarstiQ]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 07:47:42PM -0800, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> > I cannot come up with a reasonable choice here.  Either way has
> > drawbacks.  We've been through this before and went with the X11
> > license.  Maybe it's time to rethink that decision... maybe not.  All
> > I can say is that I for one would like to know how current developers
> > stand on this issue.  Has anyone's thoughts/opinions changed
> > significantly?
> 
> Mine at least yes... I used to think that proprietary versions of Wine
> wouldn't matter, since we already have to compete against the ultimate
> proprietary Wine (the one from Redmond). But I see now that there are
> ways to make the code kind-of-proprietary that can actually cause more
> harm to Wine than purely proprietary ones, and I think we should do
> something to address this issue.
> 
> What do others think?

I might not have contributed much (one measily patch), but as far as I
can see the only hurt that potentially can get done is less incentive to
work on core wine, and less to use it by users (and thus maybe less
incentive to develop etc etc). I'm not sure how much this allready has
happened, for all I know it has been WineX where the d3d, Installshield
and other "game related" stuff has been happening. Of course, that may
be because I'm relatively new to the development.

Personally I believe TransGaming will channel all this back, maybe they
can do certain parts (IS) before they reach their goals as set out in
their Business Model, which has happened before I believe. 
In the relationship with TransGaming it would be nice if these "premature"
submissions could be made known, scheduled, or some such so that the
rest of us knows what is going on. Knowing there is code growing that
makes certain "juicy" bits work is exciting (to me at least), and
knowing that it isn't totally free dampens that excitement a bit. I am
not commercially involved with wine, so that is pretty much all I feel.

I have no idea how this will work when they have their subscriber base, 
as subscribers can cancel their account a month later (I think, I have
no real knowledge of how this works). So directly working on core wine
might not be a sensible idea (then again, I have no real business
knowledge either :). Something along the line of monthly merges mayhaps
? And probally pieces of coherent code (say, d3d8). Anyway, this is
something for TransGaming to establish, and I hope they reach 20,000
subscribers soon.


More on a theoretical train of thought, other companies (has anyone had
contact with Lindows yet ?) might do this also, and with not so good
motives. I don't think the threat of one of those overtaking wine in
popularity is big, and there will always be loyal supportes of the core
wine (the hurd is not dead) so we should be able to plug along and
implement everything ourselves. I personally do not care much for
marketshare, having more people switch to open source OSes does appeal
to me, but I would be content also when it would be just me and other
free-software freaks *cough*.

To conclude this rather long rant, I think the current license is ok.

> -- 
> Alexandre Julliard
> julliard at winehq.com

LarstiQ / Wouter van Heyst