Contributing money to WINE?

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Freitag 06 April 2007 14:38 schrieb Frank Russo:

Beeing a Codeweavers employee myself my view on this matter is obviously 
biased. Just a disclaimer, that no one argues I'm hiding my own interests.

> Wine Party Fund:
> The purpose of the Wine Party Fund is to show appreciation to Wine
> developers by collecting funds for developer meetings, such as future
> Wine Conferences, or in some cases to purchase documentation.
>
> 	That's fine and all, but I am looking for a way to contribute to
> the actual development (and only development).  If I wanted to buy
> someone beer, it would be an attractive woman (If Alexandre is a
> unisex/woman's name, I sincerely appologize).  Having been to a number
> of conferences, they don't stirke me as being of much value.  I want to
> pay for a developer, or rather his/her development time> . 
WineConf mainly serves to build up personal relationships between developers, 
to turn E-Mail addresses and IRC Nicks into actual human beeings. While the 
use of that can't be measured in lines of code it should not be 
underevaluated. I think creates a better and more productive development 
environment.

---
The rest is mainly confuse talk about payment and wine development.
---

> 	This brings me to Codeweavers and Transgaming.  As far as I can
> tell, TG deosn't really give a whole heck of a lot back to the WINE
> project.  Purchasing a TG subscription really is not in anyone's best
> interests.  However, Codeweavers appears to do a whole lot.  The only
> problem is that I have no interest in their product, and purchasing it
> only funds WINE development indirectly/partially.  I also don't like
> their pricing model, since they require up-front payment for a product I
> won't ever use.
While TG's payment model has its own advantages for sure, CrossOver's upfront 
payment makes things much easier. We can ship CrossOver on CDs buyable in 
shops, less bureocracy, more freedom regarding the payment method(*). No 
issue if you want to terminate the subscription since there is no regular 
payment.

Most Wine developers are either hobbyists who want their favorite apps 
running(I started with Empire Earth, still doesn't run), or employed by 
CodeWeavers, a Linux company, or other companies. The Wine Project exists as 
a financial entity, but it does not employ developers. As you have noticed, 
the wine party fund is what it is - for funding parties.

But of course you can always pay any developer or company for doing the work 
you want. Regarding Games there are Henri Verbeet(d3d), Roderick 
Colenbrander(opengl), Fabian Bieler(d3d), Maarten Lankhorst(sound), 
Griswold(does the cursor stuff, don't know his real name), Chris 
Robinson(quatz, opengl), me(d3d), and a number of helpful users who test 
their games regularly and track down regressions if something breaks. Karsten 
Elfenbein mainly gets the credit for debugging Eve Online. All I did was to 
clean up his hacks and send them in for inclusion after there was a lot of 
demand for Eve Online support in CrossOver Mac. If someone wants to work on 
some games you like you can get in contact and agree on whatever you want to 
agree :-) . As far as I am concerned, you can buy CrossOver and vote on your 
games in our application database(right now eve online is the highest voted 
game), or pledge on a game(eve online beeing 2nd after some poker client).

Thanks for your interest in wine and your positive feedback :-)
Stefan


(*) This is what leads me to working on Wine. A few years back, aged 16, I 
wanted to run my games on Linux. Cedega looked promising, and $15 a worthy 
amount of money to spend to try it, and $5 per month is not really expensive 
IMO. Issue is just that at least here in Austria I couldn't get a Credit card 
to pay for cedega. Wine development didn't have an age tag on it, so thats 
the way I went(though it took me 2 years to really get started).
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