Hi, I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows: www.lindows.com/screenshots Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if - from the screenshots they're running either Office 2K or office XP, Internet Explorer, the fonts looks like MS TTF fonts, and I think those screenshots are modified a bit - look at the 2nd screenshots, behind the start menu - look at the "file/edit/view" menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some parts of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better shape then what is it today. Hetz
Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's they are breaking :) M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like windows? No chanec. Which probably means we'll never see a line of code.. A) Because they'll keep it to themselves, and B) because they'll be out of buisness within a month of first sales. Call me a cynic :p Regards, | Any significantly advanced technology is | indistinguishable from a perl script. Ender | (James Brown) | [Nehahra, EasyCuts, PureLS, www.QuakeSrc.org] On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 12:48:14 +0200 From: Hetz Ben Hamo <hetz(a)kde.org> To: wine-devel(a)winehq.com Subject: Lindows screenshots
Hi,
I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows: www.lindows.com/screenshots
Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if - from the screenshots they're running either Office 2K or office XP, Internet Explorer, the fonts looks like MS TTF fonts, and I think those screenshots are modified a bit - look at the 2nd screenshots, behind the start menu - look at the "file/edit/view" menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some parts of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better shape then what is it today.
Hetz
"J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)" <ender(a)enderboi.com> wrote in message news:Pine.LNX.4.31.0201042213560.18672-100000(a)shaker.worfie.net...
Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's they are breaking :)
M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like windows? No chanec.
Did you notice that M$ are already on the offensive; they are going to court over the name itself. Bill
Yeah, M$ is claiming that they got -indows as a registered trademark. But, they tried to register "Windows" (by itself) as a registered trademark a few years back. But they got turned down because the word "windows" is a common English word. They cannot register word suffices as registered trademarks IMO. Personally, who is going to confuse between "Windows" and "Lindows?" If one isn't paying attention, they may sound similar, but in print, they are unmistakingly different. It's yet another abuse of their monopoly status. Just my two cents worth. ** Derek J Witt ** * Email: mailto:djw(a)flinthills.com * * Home Page: http://www.flinthills.com/~djw/ * *** "...and on the eighth day, God met Bill Gates." - Unknown ** On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Bill Medland wrote:
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 07:48:37 -0800 From: Bill Medland <medbi01_1(a)accpac.com> To: wine-devel(a)winehq.com Subject: Re: Lindows screenshots
"J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)" <ender(a)enderboi.com> wrote in message news:Pine.LNX.4.31.0201042213560.18672-100000(a)shaker.worfie.net...
Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's they are breaking :)
M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like windows? No chanec.
Did you notice that M$ are already on the offensive; they are going to court over the name itself.
Bill
"Hetz Ben Hamo" <hetz(a)kde.org> wrote in message news:E16MRt0-0004gu-00(a)witch.dyndns.org...
Hi,
I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows: www.lindows.com/screenshots
Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if
Why? It looks to me like KDE & Wine and enough hard work to get a couple of office apps up with some reasonable fonts (and the usual minimal touchup work for marketing screenshots) <Cut>
menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some parts of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better shape then what is it today.
I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff back? Bill
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff back?
What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P Jun-Young -- Bang Jun-Young <junyoung(a)mogua.com>
"Bang Jun-Young" <junyoung(a)mogua.com> wrote in message news:20020108023339.A5460(a)krishna...
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff back?
What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P
Sorry you took offence. I am in awe of what the team have achieved since the early days and impressed at how rapidly things appear to be moving at present. I believe in what Wine is doing, which is part of the reason why I am one of the people working on it (although I don't do all that much). I also get an impression that much of the development is based on altruism rather than financial concerns (which I guess is your point). Wine is now getting to quite an advanced state and so begins to look attractive to a lot of people. We have just finished a major discussion of the license and are basically going to leave it as it stands; at least that's my understanding. (And I agree with that) Gavriel has been quite up-front about what TransGaming are doing, in a business sense. Basically when the company reaches the equivalent of about $1million a year they can consider that they are recouping their investment and can feel comfortable passing back significant code. This implies to me a sense of honesty tinged with realistic business sense. Lindows, to the best of my knowledge, have made no such business committment to Wine; they agree to abide by all licenses but, as we have just discussed, the license does not require them to publish their source code. Considering their marketing etc. and their target market.I expect them to hang onto the work they have done for quite a while before feeding it back to the Wine tree. Maybe I am wrong (and I hope I am) but what we have to recognise is that Wine is now getting to the stage at which big business gets interested. Bill NB These are my own personal views..
Bang Jun-Young wrote:
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff back?
What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P
Jun-Young
-- Bang Jun-Young <junyoung(a)mogua.com>
Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone else to use, including the source. I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it retroactive and enforce it. James
On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, James Tabor wrote:
Bang Jun-Young wrote:
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff back?
What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P
Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone else to use, including the source.
I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it retroactive and enforce it.
Once a license has been granted, it can't be unilaterally revoked. Although going forward Wine could be distributed under a different license than the present one, past decisions will stand. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone else to use, including the source.
I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it retroactive and enforce it. James
Well, I wouldn't go that far. But alas the Lindows work will probably never see the light of day, according to the interview linked from slashdot.. "While Lindows will be constructed on top of open-source software, some of its key elements will be proprietary -- a strategy that will not make some open-source advocates happy but which Robertson says is essential to making the business work." Similar to Transgaming, only it looks like they've made major progress in making just everyday apps work.
At 12:14 AM 1/10/02 +0000, James Tabor wrote:
Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone else to use, including the source.
To prevent this type of thing from happening is that the GPL was invented. But that doesn't mean that the WINE license is bad. Lets be honest, if WINE was GPL, then Lindows would not exist, and WINE would be in the same developing state that it is now. Since WINE is not GPL, someone took his chance and created Lindows, and WINE is also in the same developing state, since that company didn't contribute anything back. But, as you notice, this didn't make any difference for the status of WINE. As you see, with or without GPL(or LGPL) the developing state of the WINE project wouldn't change. But there are more dangers for the WINE license. It would be possible for a company like Lindows hire away all WINE developers, effectively hijacking the project. Alternatively if Lindows becomes a success it will be able to hire more programmers and keep improving their own version of WINE, so that it would always be much better than the free WINE. I wonder why this didn't happen to FreeBSD. Anyway, I'm not unhappy with the WINE license. In fact, since most important open source projects are GPL, or LGPL, I think it is interesting to have some projects under a different license to see the practical implications this will have. I think WINE is a good study case for that. It will help us all to see the advantages and disadvantages of the GPL(LGPL) and draw conclusions for the future from that. Suppose that in a few years another Opensource project faces the question of what license it will need, then we can point back and say: look at the WINE project and what license they had and what happened to them, etc... Just my 0.05$ Roland
On 2002.01.10 12:25 Roland wrote: [snip]
But there are more dangers for the WINE license. It would be possible for a company like Lindows hire away all WINE developers, effectively hijacking the project. Alternatively if Lindows becomes a success it will be able to hire more programmers and keep improving their own version of WINE, so that it would always be much better than the free WINE. I wonder why this didn't happen to FreeBSD.
First of all, licensing has been discussed to death and will remain as MIT for the forseable future. Although I note you are not arguing this.. just throwing this out. Personally I would not want to work for a company that took free software, fixed or hacked around some major bugs, and sold it for $100 a copy. While I couldn't speak for the other Wine developers I feel that many of them would not be willing to do this. Look at CodeWeavers and TransGaming. CW sells the service of porting an application from Windows to winelib. For their business to function properly they need a Wine which works well. It is true that since they contribute most of their modifications back (with some very minor exceptions) someone /could/ compete with them. However, if you were a company who was going to contract out the porting of your windows application, who would you trust? Some newcomer to the field with no reputation or a company who employs top Wine developers? And in the event that someone does enter the market successfully... well, more power to them. Jeremy has stated several times that contributing CW modifications back to Wine is actually in his best business interest as it means he does not have to deal with a totally overmodified tree and instead reaps all of the benefits of free software including people who build on his work and contribute that to the Wine project. According to Jeremey, moving to a GPL license could potentially help CodeWeavers (see previous mails in the list archives). TransGaming sells the service of enhancing Wine to run popular games. Contributing all of their modifications back to Wine would mean no one would want to buy their product when they can get Wine for free. Contrast this with CW who have already been paid for the work (or at least have a contract to be paid). However, TransGaming does still release their source under a non-free license which at least gives the user some freedom. For TG, moving to the GPL would be very disastrous to their business model, well, there was some debate on how disastrous it would be, but it would harm them in some ways. Now look at Lindows. Basically they want to take the work that many people have spent a lot of time creating and essentially steal it for their own benefit. I am gonna laugh though when Wine is actually good enough that their modifications have no value over Wine. Plus, it's not exactly as if Lindows is a new idea. MANY people have proposed this exact same idea (including myself I think). Let's look at what exactly Lindows has done: 1. They added the Windows programs menu into the KDE menu. Big deal, trivial. 2. They made KDE look as much like Windows as possible. Again... big deal. 3. They fixed some bugs with Wine. Or at least hacked around them (more likely) to make popular applications work. Trust me.. getting MS Office 2000 working is no big shit. Neither is IE. Both of these programs almost work with a few crashes and a few native DLLs. Assuming they are using wine dlls then one thing I assume they did was fix the common controls stuff to look right. This part is not trivial, but not unreachable either. Is $100 really worth it? I thought that was a joke when I saw it. They've been developing this for what.. a few months, half a year maybe? It still crashes, and I'll bet if this goes on the market and office crashes a lot of people are going to bitch about the stability of Linux, when really it's because they are using alpha software (Wine). Sorry about the rant, just had a few things I wanted to say. -Dave
participants (9)
-
Bang Jun-Young -
Bill Medland -
David Elliott -
Derek J Witt -
Hetz Ben Hamo -
J.Brown (Ender/Amigo) -
James Tabor -
Roland -
Steve Langasek