[wine] Re: Commercial support

[David Lee Lambert]

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 10:19:55AM +1000, Troy Rollo wrote:
> > On 5/7/05, Shachar Shemesh <wine-devel at shemesh.biz> wrote:
> > > I really suggest we adhere to KISS - Keep It Simple.
> 
> In any case, the difficulty you have here is that anything you do that sets a 
> barrier against the bad guys is also likely to set a barrier against the good 
> guys. 
...
> If you ask the question "how can the WINE project stop some random company X 
> from exploiting the situation unfairly", then perhaps hoops is a good idea.
> 
> If you ask the question "how can the WINE project get the maximum possible 
> benefit from this", then hoops may not be a good idea, since the WINE 
> project's interests lie in the largest possible pool of suppliers of 
> services.

(Sorry about jumping in at the tail end of this discussion.)

I say that we should accept all good-faith requests for inclusion after a
posting on wine-devel or a patch against the website on wine-patches. Of 
course,  the page should have a disclaimer such as "Inclusion on this list 
does not constitute endorsement by WineHQ, its sponsors, or any Wine 
developer."  I hope someone will visit the websites once in a while,  and 
post another patch if the linked page obviously has nothing to do with 
Wine.

If the list gets big enough that it needs to be sorted,  we could order it 
by lines-of-code-contributed, as suggested.  

Alternately, we could order the list by the provider's net operating
income (aka "Income from Operations"?) during their previous fiscal
year, and stick everyone who can't/won't provide financial information at
the end, alphabetically.  This wouldn't obligate anyone to pay anything,
of course, but it would seperate the serious *commercial* support
(companies or individuals who pay atention to their own financial
statements) from organizations that would be less prepared to deal with a 
lot of new business.

However,  both of these ideas are just things to think about when the list 
gets longer.

-- 
David Lee Lambert (also as4109 at wayne.edu)    cell ph# 586-873-8813
PGP key at http://www.cse.msu.edu/~lamber45/newmail.htm#GPGKey