Contributing to WINE

[Shachar Shemesh]

Ronald Robin wrote:

> Hi! My name is Ronald and I was wondering if any of you guys out there 
> can help me get in touch with Mr. Alexander Julliard or any of the 
> leaders here in the WINE community. We've been trying to get in touch 
> with him for months now and we have consistently failed to receive a 
> response.
>
>  
>
> My company, SpecOps Labs, would like to discuss how we can contribute 
> and work together with the WINE community. We believe we have a lot to 
> contribute to the WINE community. However, without contact with any of 
> the executives at WINEHQ, we are unable to do so.
>
>  
>
> We want to engage in an initial dialog with Mr. Julliard. Our CTO has 
> already tried emailing him twice. It's possible we don't have the 
> right contact information. We'd greatly appreciate it if someone here 
> could help us out.
>
Hi Ronald,

First, allow me to say that it is a pleasure to finally hear from 
SpecOps directly. So far, all the communication between your company and 
this project have been through press releases on your part, and public 
responses on ours. I am hoping we will all find that direct 
communication is a better way to conduct both business and development.

I cannot answer for Alexandre regarding your inquiries with him. I am 
not even sure what "leaders in the WINE community" mean. As a free 
software project, wine has no executives, as it is not a body with a 
legally standing existence.

If the cooperation discussion you wish to conduct is of a technical 
nature, the best way to conduct them is here, on this list. If it is of 
a legal nature, I'm not really sure what your legal standing would be. 
Legally, Wine belongs to its copyright holders, many of them can be 
reached through this list, but not all of them. Neither Alexandre, nor 
any other single person or entity, can approve activities that require 
all copyright holder's consent. This includes, among other things I'm 
probably forgetting, selling the code and changing the code's license to 
something not LGPL compatible.

If what you are after is hired work to help you in development, you have 
several options. First of all, to the best of my knowledge, there are 
three companies that today have the know how to provide such services. 
These are CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com), TransGaming 
(http://www.transgaming.com/) who mostly work on their own proprietary 
variant of Wine, and my company, Lingnu (http://www.lingnu.com). There 
may also be other companies I am not aware of. Your best bet with any of 
those is to go through the "contact information" on their web site.

In addition to that, some of the wine hackers on this list also work as 
free lancers. I am sure that directing a request to this list asking for 
hired help will provide you with people willing to sell you their time 
and knowledge.

Hoping I've been helpful,

                Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/