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

[James McKenzie]

muncrief wrote:
> Well I must say.
>
> I certainly feel like a fool now.
>   

Don't.  Codeweavers sells a commercial version of Wine, much like Red 
Hat sells a commercial version of Linux.  Both contribute greatly to 
their respective projects.
> I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home page.
>   
You have definitely been contributing to Wine.  Codeweavers may provide 
most of the support for Wine, but they do not contribute to all of the 
support needed.
> I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are employed by CrossOver.
>   
Yes, they are.  Actually, they are employed by Codeweavers to work on 
the CrossOver project. 
> Is this legal?
>   
Yes.  It is legal to work for an employer that supports the project you 
love.  It is a great thing to be paid doing what you love.
> To claim you are an open source project and take money from those contributing in good faith, and give it to a private for profit company?.
>   
The Wine project does not do this.  They do, however, accept code 
updates from the CrossOver product as well as many other contributors 
(and I may be one of them.)
> I don't think so.
>
> So I must be misunderstanding something.
>   
You are.  So let us set the story straight.  Some of the Wine 
contributors work for CodeWeavers, who make a commercial product, 
CrossOver.  Any updates and fixes from CrossOver are fed back, almost 
immediately, to Wine.  This provides a great source of updates and in 
many cases, the fixes you want are produced by these fine folks.  
Without CodeWeavers and the CrossOver product, Wine would be basically 
non-existent and there would be no massive effort to bring the Windows 
API to Linux/UNIX.
> Could someone please explain, clearly, whether Wine is an open source project or not? And whether or not Wine purposely cripples it's game playing and other capabilities so that CrossOver can prosper?
>   
Wine is Open Source.  You can modify it any way you find meets your 
needs, within legal limits, and provide your updates back to the 
project.  Wine in no way or fashion is crippleware.

> There must be a logical explanation, or people who were fooled into donating would have sued Wine for fraud long ago.
>
>
>   
Logical explaination:  Codeweavers is a company that produces a 
commercial product: CrossOver from the Wine base.  They also send any 
fixes back to that base.  Many of the folks at Codeweavers are Wine 
developers and programmers.  Without Codeweavers, Wine would not be 
where it is today.  The same could be said for Linux.  Without the 
popularity of Red Hat Linux and its derivatives (CentOS is only one of 
them), Linux would not be as popular today and as well built.

Thus, your monies are going to help support those areas of the Wine 
project that are not supported by Codeweavers.  If this were not true, 
both the Wine project and Codeweavers would be in legal trouble.


James McKenzie