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

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi,

Getting common applications working is NOT the goal of wine. The goal of wine 
is to write an open source reimplementation of the Win32 api. Those two goals 
are related, but not exactly the same. The difference is how to deal with 
hacks that are known to be incorrect but happen to fix an application. Those 
are not accepted into wine, no matter which application they fix.

CrossOver uses Wine under its hood, and CrossOver's wine tree contains some 
hacks to make Microsoft Office and other popular applications happy. However, 
CodeWeavers contributes patches back and employs many major developers to 
work on various parts of wine, including Alexandre Julliard, Robert Shearman, 
Jakec Caban, me, and many others.

Neither Wine nor CrossOver are specifically targeted at games or office 
applications. CrossOver supports some games(like Half-Life 1 and 2, World of 
Warcraft, Prey), and my job is to work on Wine's Direct3D support.

I won't be able to convice you that the whole thing is not a conspicary 
because I am a codeweavers employee, but maybe searching the wine changelog 
for @codeweavers.com can convice you? (Though many codeweavers employees use 
their own private mail address to send patches).

Regarding the hacks to get Microsoft Office running, the modified Wine source 
in CrossOver is publically available at 
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source . You are welcome to locate the 
hacks that fix Microsoft Office(I think their authors will kindly assist you 
with that), clean them up and send them to wine-patches for inclusion. (on a 
sidenode, a few weeks ago I noticed that some mirror had a broken copy of the 
archive which did not unpack completely. I think it should be fixed by now. 
So if the archive doesn't unzip its not conspiracy, it is a fault of the 
provider of our mirrors)

Hope my explanations answer your questions,
Stefan
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