Governance revisited (Wineconf report)

[Robert Lunnon]

On Sunday 24 September 2006 00:36, Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
> 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

You make the implicit assumption that you can't have both functionality and 
technical soundness. I did not suggest a free-for-all, I suggested that a 
managed objective be established and that "Hacks" that are necessary for 
functionality and are sufficiently limited in scope can be acceptable if they 
meet a need of the community.

Secondly, I am starting to get rather annoyed that I am being portrayed as 
anti Alexandre. This is not the case, Alexandre does a pretty good job given 
the governance model, but the model itself has severe deficiencies and is not 
community focused.

Bob