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

L. Rahyen research at science.su
Fri Mar 28 07:24:11 CDT 2008


On Friday March 28 2008 07:21:30 muncrief wrote:
> 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.

	You are mistaken. As far as I know Codeweavers contribute ALL source code 
back to WINE (only exception is some hacks that aren't acceptable for WINE 
for obvious reasons; but this is very minor difference).
	You may ask, if so, why CrossOver exist? What is the difference between WINE 
and CrossOver, if Codeweavers contribute all their work to WINE? Well, 
CrossOver have some hacks that aren't acceptable for WINE (as I already 
said). But there is no much of them, so this is very minor difference. In 
fact, WINE often works *better* than CrossOver (CrossOver is always "behind" 
because it use somewhat old code-base of WINE). But CrossOver comes with 
commercial support, some additional GUI and this is main difference. 
Personally I used both WINE and CrossOver but in my case WINE worked better 
because of newer codebase, so I don't use CrossOver anymore (though I tried 
different version of its demo) and I like WINE more because it always newer 
and better. CrossOver in my opinion only can be better if you need some hacks 
that it offers or commercial user support. I don't need this so I'm using 
WINE.
	In other words, WINE is open source project and its functionality *isn't* 
limited because of existence of CrossOver.
	Just think about work made by Codeweavers like some kind of donation for WINE 
Project.

> 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.

	You confusing some things. VMWare have *limited* (for commercial reasons) 
contribution to open-source. VMWare mostly offer commercial products.
	Codeweavers contribute all their code except hacks that aren't acceptable, 
and they *do* work to minimize number of hacks used by improving WINE. 
Codeweavers *aren't* owners of WINE. They are separate company. But they did 
a lot of donations (by sending patches) to WINE Project.
	There is another company, Transgaming. This is an example of company who have 
*limited* contribution to open-source for commercial reasons (like VMWare). 
They contributed very little of their work back to WINE Project - but they 
are using WINE for commercial purpose, and don't donate anything back (like 
patches or something else) for a long time.

	So, if you still didn't understand something - feel free to ask. But you must 
understand that Codeweavers are separate company who donate their work for 
WINE; they do not limit functionality of WINE itself, and they contribute 
their work back to WINE Project. So you see in news information about their 
products just for this reason - because they are donated a lot of their work 
for WINE Project.
	As you can see, both Wine project and Codeweaver are honest about what they 
do. You just misunderstood some things.



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