Governance revisited (Wineconf report)

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Robert Lunnon [bobl at optushome.com.au] wrote:
 
> On community, the wine project doesn't represent a community in the sense that 
> Wine has an altruistic purpose to provide value to that community - It 
> doesn't do that because the wine developer base doesn't measure important to 
> Wine users and set policy to provide that value. This means Wine isn't a 
> particularly good Product. Wine is a developers play-thing, Crossover is a 
> Product !

Considering that CrossOver does pay the bill for some part and the major driving
force behind Wine is and has been for a long time Codeweavers, no matter if you
like it or not, I feel that a Wine with a much more loose acceptance policy but
without the Codeweavers support it has now would be not half as far as it is. It
would contain all sorts of hacks and workarounds for specific applications but be
basically an unmaintainable beast and much further from providing a proper basic
infrastructure with COM/DCOM and MSI support (to name some examples) as it should
be done rather than as it might just barely work for some popular applications.

A project driven mostly by users most likely is focusing on providing fast fixes
that make a specific application work, while Alexandre is specifically trying to
make sure that there is a clean (both technically and legally) infrastructure
on which one can build for years to come. And which by coincidence will deliver
a very good platform to build CrossOver from. It does mean that you can't expect
it to immediately deliver support for all the apps you and many others might like
but on the other hand it will mean that once new MS technologies get used more
widespread it is much easier if not only possible then, to add them and provide
faster support for newer apps.

For some part it does boil down to "I want to have fun now" vs "I want to have
a technically sound infrastructure that can stand some time". In that sense Wine
as is is maybe not a product in the sense of our fast and trigger happy marketing
world but it is certainly a product in the sense of engineering and even more so
than CrossOver. But then you pay something for CrossOver and not for Wine so maybe
that is also why Wine can't and shouldn't really be a product in the sense of
marketing. 

And as with all OpenSource projects, those that provide the most support in terms
of code submissions, testing and documentation get to say the most and I think it
has been clear that most of them are quite content if not happy with the modus
operandi. Of course Alexandre can be a pain sometimes but he has been always with
a reason as far as I can tell.

Rolf Kalbermatter