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
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