Is Wine a platform for Codeweaver to make money?! Please help me understand.

[Tony Lambregts]

Scott Ritchie wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 09:59 +1000,
> nicholas.g.lawrence at mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote:
>>> Sasan
>>> ...but I think having the top most used windows
>>> software working on Wine out of the box will do wonders for its
>>> popularity
>> Is popularity a desirable goal?
>>
>> Will increasing the number of users result in a
>> benefit for the Wine project?
>>
>> nick
> 
> Yes.  Wine's development speed has roughly correlated with its user
> base; popularity brings more bug reports, volunteers, and funding for
> paid work.
> 
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie
> 

I whole heartedly agree. If it were not for "dirty little hacks" Crossover Linux
would not run some of the very programs that make it so popular. Popularity with
users is the driving force for developers. Developers go where the users are and
I know there are enough bug reports in bugzilla to keep all the developers we
can handle busy. I am not saying that we should put in just any old hack but
there are cases where we really miss the boat because we want to get things "right".

Take for example bug 6413: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6413 This is
just one case of a generic problem where a program provides it own version of a
DLL but wine does not use it. There have been quite a number of bugs with this
same problem. In most of these bug reports (all?) it has been that our
implementation needed to be fixed to match what native provides. I am not sure
that this is the case here but I think that is beside the point.

>From past experimentation I have seen that windows will not use its own version
of a DLL if it finds one int the same directory as the program so why do we not
do the same?

Yes, we would not get that particular bug report but we may have lost many more
users because of the same problem. If we want to have the best of both worlds we
could have a message box pop up saying that wine found a program supplied DLL
and if you use it, you could be covering up a bug in our implementation of that
DLL and let the user decide. Some users will try out our built in and make a bug
report and that bug report will be easier to deal with that trying to track down
which DLL overrides might work.


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Tony Lambregts