WineHQ should discourage the use of cracks

[Vincent Povirk]

But the wine project DOES encourage the use of cracks. It allows some
applications with unsupported copy-protection to run on Linux, but
only if a crack is used, creating an incentive for some people to use
cracks. QED.

The way to stop doing that would be to support copy protections and
make cracks useless, except for people who would need them anyway.
(This is not easy, I know.)

It's not clear to me what you want to accomplish by changing the
ratings. If games that only work with a crack become bronze instead of
gold, will fewer people really use cracks? Will they decide, from just
looking at the rating, that they don't want to use wine for their app?
Is that really a good thing if it happens?

I don't think this would change the incentives, and thus how much wine
encourages cracks, at all.

So would you be doing this just to make someone I don't know about happy?

That said, I don't really see the fact that it's likely to have no
real effect as a reason not to change the ratings. It just makes doing
it a bit silly.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:15 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> I've been fighting against the notion that the
>  wine project encourages cracks for some time now.
>  Cracked versions of apps are bad because they are
>  a) illegal (at least in the US),
>  b) disrespectful of the author of the app, and
>  c) much more likely to be infected with malware.
>
>  One place we still do it is in our appdb ratings definitions;
>  http://appdb.winehq.org//help/?sTopic=maintainer_ratings
>  which say
>  "Gold: Application works flawlessly with some DLL overrides or other
>  settings, crack etc. "
>
>  I propose that we change the appdb ratings definitions
>  so that an app that only works with a crack gets no higher
>  than bronze.
>
>  Any objections?
>  - Dan
>
>
>



-- 
Vincent Povirk