Wine, enthusiasts, businesses and the agony of the license

[Patrik Stridvall]

> On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 11:40:54AM +0100, Fredrik Ohrn wrote:
> > Another observation is that companies in group 1 are in 
> direct competition
> > with each other, so they want closed source. If TransGaming 
> released their
> > DirectX work BSD style, Lindows would quickly be there to 
> appropriate it.
> 
> You miss one case here: Companies in group 1 that also want 
> to make money
> with group 2s business model. They could do that easily and 
> it would give
> them a distinct competitive advantage over the group 2 only 
> type enterprises.
> Result: The group 2 only companies *can't* release their 
> sources any more
> if they want to stay in business.

I'm not sure that I follow you. Groups 2 companies (like Corel) have
one or more Windows application that are likely to be their primary source
of income. How can group 1 (like CodeWeavers and Transgaming) companies
compete with that? Sure they can compete other group 1 companies to get 
contract with the group 2 company. If the application was DirectX based I
can
imagine that Transgaming are likely to give a better bid. But I don't see
how
they compete with the group 2 company.

And in the example above I'm sure that Gavriel according to his promises
will release any non-DirectX related stuff he had to do in order to
fulfill the contract and if group 2 company is nice perhaps they
might even require him to release some of the DirectX related code.