Commercial support

Shachar Shemesh wine-devel at shemesh.biz
Tue May 3 03:53:04 CDT 2005


MediaHost (TM) wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm not sure, if winehq should be a platform for advertisements of 
> commercial services (except maybe codeweavers), otherwise there will 
> be a very long list there, very soon.

That's good, in principle. The problem brought up during wineconf was 
that the lack of commercial support is viewed by potential deployers as 
a minus, making wine a dangerous technology. Saying "here is a list of 
companies willing to take your money and give you support" is actually a 
good thing for Wine.

> And who to include and who not?

Ah, there you have hit a more serious problem. For example, there is no 
doubt that CodeWeavers has been both a^Hthe major wine driving force, 
AND a financial sponsor. However, if we don't allow other companies 
room, we are unfair towards the other companies, towards CodeWeavers 
(why should they continue to be practically the only ones carrying the 
load), and towards Wine (and we don't want Wine to become a CodeWeavers 
subproject, do we?).

I can suggest a simple rule to go by, as to whether to include a company 
or not. In order to be included, a company has to show that it has 
contributed (via it's employees or directly) a non-trivial patch to 
wine. We can even limit it to "in the past year". At the moment, I 
believe only three companies pass that criteria (CodeWeavers, Lingnu, 
and Dimi's company, whose name he has successfully kept secret, for some 
reason).

Alternatively, we can have several lists. A "Gold" list, which includes 
companies that have the means to produce fixes to wine itself if 
necessary (as judged by the above criteria), and a normal list, which 
merely includes anyone who declares that they are willing to provide 
commercial support. I would have suggested a nominal fee (i.e. - a $50 
contribution to the wine fund per year, or some such thing) from the 
last list. On the up side, it allows us to know the company is still 
active in this field. On the down side, I don't think we have the 
resources to start tracking who paid and who didn't.

I could even suggest a platinum list, which would include any company 
that employs the equivalent of a full time Wine developer or up. Of 
course, this currently only includes CodeWeavers.

The idea I'm trying to push here is that we can do such a list, so long 
as we keep clear objective criterias for who gets listed where.

> Are there such plans to include such links on the website, except for 
> community based support?

That's what we talked about over wineconf. It seems that such a list 
gives credibility to a project, and as such is a wanted thing. A company 
considering wine deployment is more likely to accept wine if they know 
they can get support for it.

          Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
Have you backed up today's work? http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html




More information about the wine-devel mailing list