Clarification on my call for license change

[James Hatheway]

> >Several people have asked me to clarify my original post.
> I just don't understand one thing:
> How does your company expect to make money once WINE is xGPLed? If all your 
> code has to be contributed back, why should I buy it from your company?

Hi,

Companies will pay because they want certain functionality to be implemented
that isn't there.  For example, let's say you are company Foo, who wants 
their product "FooBar for Windows 2000" to work in Linux using WINE.
It makes use of some COM related functionality not currently in WINE
(like Out-of-proc objects or something)  What do you do?
I mean, you can't just post on wine-devl and say "hey guys, stop making
patches for DirectX, we want you to fix this COM stuff and NOW!"
No way.  Do you get your internal staff to do it? Maybe.  However,
most likely none of them know anything about WINE, so there is a big
ramp up time.  Or do you hire an outside company to help you out,
a WINE developer-for-hire so to speak.  That's why companies like
Macadamian and CodeWeavers get hired by clients, to get functionality
into WINE that would otherwise not get done.  It allows the client to focus
the fixes in the areas they need for their particular application.  Sure, these
changes (optionally for BSD license, "required" for GPL) are made available to
competitors, but as far back as I remember and for a while yet I imagine
any moderately complex app will always require some fixes to WINE to get
it to work perfectly.


-James
-- 
James Hatheway
james at macadamian.com ~ http://www.macadamian.com
Software Designer - Macadamian Technologies, Inc.
-- Software experts for the world's leading technology companies.


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