Is Wine a platform for Codeweaver to make money?! Please help me understand.

[Kai Blin]

On Sunday 08 April 2007 08:51, Tony Lambregts wrote:

> > What boat? I'm not selling a product. I don't need to meet any deadline.
> > Unless Google pays me,
>
> We (The Wine project) produce a product and we have a deadline even if you
> do not acknowledge it. It occurs every time we cannot run a program when a
> potential user really needs it.

Ok, it's not what I'd call a deadline. It's more like a dead vague area. But 
with your definition, I can agree that we have something like that.

>
> > I do my Wine development in my spare time.
>
> So do I, In fact so do a lot of people. Welcome to the club.

Yes, I just wanted to point out that I have two modes when working on Wine. 
One is in my spare time, and one is when I'm paid to work on it.

> > I've spent
> > my last two years working on a feature that about a handful apps out
> > there will use. There is one bug report in bugzilla for my stuff, and
> > that's actually invalid. If I spent my time waiting for users to get
> > interested in this area, Wine still wouldn't do NTLM.
>
> Your right about NTLM not being used much and that is part of the reason
> for not having many bug report against it, Another part of it is that if a
> program uses NTLM but it does not install or crashes before requiring any
> authentication you will not see a bug report until the previous bug is
> fixed (or worked around).

It's a rather obscure area. I know five programs using secur32.dll. One of 
them is free, the others don't even have a free demo.

> I'm really curious as to what DOES motivate you to work on NTLM if you
> don't care about users using it.

Well, I admit I wouldn't have started in that area if it wasn't the most 
interesting project I found for GSoC 2005. I had never even heard of that API 
before doing the research for that project. Now that I have started it, I of 
course want to see it working.

> Regardless of the previous statements there are plenty of other bug reports
> out there that you could work on if that do not involve NTLM. Please don't
> misunderstand me I'm not saying you that you should. What you do with your
> free time is up to you. The point I was making is that there are lots of
> unresolved bug reports to keep developers busy on if they are looking for
> something to do.

Granted. I've been doing that when I had some spare time. Working on winsock 
bugs, I can tell that about one in ten bug reports is detailed enough (after 
requesting more information) to actually nail down a bug. For the nine other 
bug reports, you can spend a lot of time searching the bug, so yes, enough to 
keep you busy.

> > Most users will figure out that clicking "use the override" will make
> > less problems than the other button. I'm not sure that'll lead to easier
> > bug reports.

[...]

> In fact this can lead to the situation where the user gets into the habit
> of always copying in as many native DLLs as he can and always overriding to
> native which is why we hate WineTools.

And how exactly is automatically using native dlls if found in the 
application's directory going to help? Won't people get into the habit of 
putting as many native dlls as possible into the application's working 
directory as well?

I agree we probably won't loose much, but I'm not sure what we're going to 
win, apart from easier dll overrides.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin, <kai Dot blin At gmail Dot com>
WorldForge developer    http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer          http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin/
--
Will code for cotton.
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