Commercial support

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 07:19:31AM -0400, gslink wrote:
> I wouldn't worry about anyone but Microsoft stealing Wine.  In order to 
> develop Wine you must be an expert C++ programmer.  That requires an 
> enormous amount of work and thieves are usually lazy.
Maybe you wouldn't worry, but I'd bet a sizeable number of Wine programmers
sure as hell do.

Wine has become a very useful and big piece of software, and the bigger
and more successful a software becomes, the more likely it gets
misappropriated (i.e. making use of its code without giving back improvements).

We've already had some corner cases (I won't mention names here, but many
people probably know it anyway), and you could bet that Wine would have
found relatively widespread abusive use if there hadn't been an LGPL change.

And the fact that "thieves are usually lazy" is the very reason why
people add foreign (debugged and working) code to their program...
Adapting is often much easier than writing from scratch on your own.

Andreas Mohr