[Wine] Is Wine taking my donations and giving them to CrossOver?

[Reece Dunn]

On 28/03/2008, muncrief <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> Well, I think I have a clearer picture of what is going on now.
>
>  And I thank all of you for your responses.
>
>  It appears that unfortunately there weren't enough open source software users such as myself who actually donate what they can so that Wine could viably exist, so Wine essentially became an R&D resource for CodeWeavers.

Wine does viably exist. Yes, it is supported by CodeWeavers, but that
is like RedHat or Ubuntu. There are many people who contribute here
and there that are not part of CodeWeavers (like me and many others),
and the community is thriving and will continue to expand and grow
independently of CodeWeavers, but in large thanks to CodeWeavers.

If CodeWeavers were to shut down (which would be a very sad day), the
people working there would still continue to develop Wine, and would
rally around to find a new host for the website.

>  I have no problem with that.
>
>  The problem I have is that, of course, Wine is not an open source project. And whether "official" or not, must offer something less than the company that employs them.

Since when is it not open source? It is released under the LGPL open
source license.

If you are worried about CodeWeavers not giving back to Wine, they do.
Almost all the code they publish for Wine gets merged back into Wine
(which some other companies do not); aside from that, the source code
for the CrossOver version of Wine (to comply with the open source
license) is available at http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source/.

CodeWeavers are responsible for the advancement of the installer,
DirectX and much more in Wine. Remember the announcement that Wine
supports Photoshop CS2, that's because of CodeWeavers. Also, check out
http://www.codeweavers.com/about/people/blogs/.

>  So I will halt my donations to Wine, which were falsely solicited.

How so? Personally, I have been purchasing copies of CrossOver when I
can, as this directly helps fund development of Wine, such as work on
the DIB engine that will improve game performance.

>  If you had been honest in the first place, I might have happily paid for your products. I have given over $500.00 to VMware because they contribute to the open source community, but are honest about what they do and do not take and release to it.

What's not honest about http://www.codeweavers.com/about/philosophy/?

>  But if you go to VMWare's home page you would never mistake them for an open source project
>
>  But Wine's home page presents you as just that, and only that. You are indeed misrepresenting yourselves.

Again, Wine *is* an open source project. CodeWeavers is a hybrid
company that uses open source, giving back to the community, while
providing additional (proprietry) features as separate projects (e.g.
bottles), a quality assurance and support.

>  And my original question was never answered.
>
>  Was the money I donated to a supposed open source project given to a for profit company?

It's not. I assume that you are referring to the "Paid Support" link
on winehq? If so, this is different from making a donation to Wine
itself.

See http://www.winehq.org/site/contributing#wpf for information on
donating to Wine itself. From that link "The purpose of the Wine Party
Fund is to show appreciation to Wine developers by collecting funds
for developer meetings, such as future Wine Conferences, or in some
cases to purchase documentation." Nowhere does that say that the money
goes to CodeWeavers.

I hope that clarifies things and answers your original question.

- Reece