Clarification on my call for license change

[Aric Stewart]

Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2002-02-15 at 09:49, Roland wrote:
> > > At 08:19 AM 2/15/02 -0600, Jeremy White wrote:
> > > >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?
> > >
> >
> >     Well, for one, we have a proprietary product that links to
> > Wine; we would continue to sell that.
> >
> >     For another, we would continue to sell services to organizations
> > who wish to use Wine, but can't because it isn't complete enough.
> >
> >     And finally, we would sell services to organizations that need
> > to depend on Wine, but cannot do so without the assurance of
> > qualified support to back up that dependence.

> But the second more important question was (in my words):
> Why should I buy a Wine distribution from you?
> 
> If you are forced to contribute back everything I can just do:
> 
> cvs update ; ./configure ; make install
> 
> What I and other have been trying to say is that some business
> models like consulting business makes sense with a LGPL:ed Wine
> but others like Transgaming:s might not. Read what Gavriel wrote
> in his first(?) reply again.


I have been avoiding this debate although reading it closely. However i
thought i would step up to the plate on this one, as someone whose
salary depends on Jeremy's vision.

The simple of it is.. you, Patrik, would not buy a Wine distribution
form us. Why would you? You are a developer, and a wine developer on top
of that. If your critical app crashes you can just hack on the code and
make it work. In fact we dont really expect anyone on this list to buy a
Wine distribution from us. However if a company unfamiliar with Wine, or
even linux wants to get a critical app working on Linux using Wine they
have to choose. The could hire a developer and have that person figure
out wine and do the work, or buy a distribution of Wine supported by
proven Wine developers. 

It is these sorts of people and companies that we want to target. And
financially Patrik's money for his license or even the money form all
the wine developers would be nearly insignificant compared to a 100+
seat site license.

As a developer who has worked on far too many
proprietary Wine trees and seen all the fights the Jeremy has gone
through. I want to be assured that i can give my code back to the wine
community.

-aric
aric at codeweavers.com