Lindows screenshots AND THE WINE LICENSE

[David Elliott]

On 2002.01.10 12:25 Roland wrote:
[snip]
> But there are more dangers for the WINE license. It would be possible 
> for a company like Lindows hire away all WINE developers, effectively 
> hijacking the project. Alternatively if Lindows becomes a success it 
> will be able to hire more programmers and keep improving their own 
> version of WINE, so that it would always be much better than the free 
> WINE. I wonder why this didn't happen to FreeBSD.
> 

First of all, licensing has been discussed to death and will remain as MIT 
for the forseable future.  Although I note you are not arguing this.. just 
throwing this out.

Personally I would not want to work for a company that took free software, 
fixed or hacked around some major bugs, and sold it for $100 a copy.  
While I couldn't speak for the other Wine developers I feel that many of 
them would not be willing to do this.

Look at CodeWeavers and TransGaming.  CW sells the service of porting an 
application from Windows to winelib.  For their business to function 
properly they need a Wine which works well. It is true that since they 
contribute most of their modifications back (with some very minor 
exceptions) someone /could/ compete with them.  However, if you were a 
company who was going to contract out the porting of your windows 
application, who would you trust?  Some newcomer to the field with no 
reputation or a company who employs top Wine developers?  And in the event 
that someone does enter the market successfully... well, more power to 
them.  Jeremy has stated several times that contributing CW modifications 
back to Wine is actually in his best business interest as it means he does 
not have to deal with a totally overmodified tree and instead reaps all of 
the benefits of free software including people who build on his work and 
contribute that to the Wine project.  According to Jeremey, moving to a 
GPL license could potentially help CodeWeavers (see previous mails in the 
list archives).

TransGaming sells the service of enhancing Wine to run popular games.  
Contributing all of their modifications back to Wine would mean no one 
would want to buy their product when they can get Wine for free.  Contrast 
this with CW who have already been paid for the work (or at least have a 
contract to be paid).  However, TransGaming does still release their 
source under a non-free license which at least gives the user some 
freedom.  For TG, moving to the GPL would be very disastrous to their 
business model, well, there was some debate on how disastrous it would be, 
but it would harm them in some ways.

Now look at Lindows.  Basically they want to take the work that many 
people have spent a lot of time creating and essentially steal it for 
their own benefit.  I am gonna laugh though when Wine is actually good 
enough that their modifications have no value over Wine.

Plus, it's not exactly as if Lindows is a new idea.  MANY people have 
proposed this exact same idea (including myself I think).  Let's look at 
what exactly Lindows has done:

1. They added the Windows programs menu into the KDE menu.  Big deal, 
trivial.
2. They made KDE look as much like Windows as possible.  Again... big deal.
3. They fixed some bugs with Wine.  Or at least hacked around them (more 
likely) to make popular applications work.  Trust me.. getting MS Office 
2000 working is no big shit.  Neither is IE.  Both of these programs 
almost work with a few crashes and a few native DLLs.  Assuming they are 
using wine dlls then one thing I assume they did was fix the common 
controls stuff to look right.  This part is not trivial, but not 
unreachable either.

Is $100 really worth it?  I thought that was a joke when I saw it.  
They've been developing this for what.. a few months, half a year maybe?  
It still crashes, and I'll bet if this goes on the market and office 
crashes a lot of people are going to bitch about the stability of Linux, 
when really it's because they are using alpha software (Wine).

Sorry about the rant, just had a few things I wanted to say.
-Dave