Hi Jason, on the off chance the rest of Transgaming hasn't already seen those two pages, please circulate the links.
One of the problems is that [to my knowledge,] we don't have any fluent German speakers in the company, so we wouldn't even know *how* to respond to those articles. :)
it'd be nice to have responses to questions like "The LGPL seems to give users the right to remove the LGPL'd portions of Cider from game A and use it with other apps. The gamers who are currently doing this are also copying proprietary parts of Cider, which isn't allowed. How will Transgaming prevent the copying of the proprietary parts of Cider without preventing the copying or modification of the LGPL portions?".
The EULA included in all games which are shipped using Cider technology spells out how each of the pieces of the Cider framework are licensed. It includes the folders which have LGPL'd WineHQ code and lists all of the various MIT/BSD-style licenses for other components. Any components which require source re-distribution (such as those licensed under the LGPL) are available on the public CVS site.
All of the license details can also be found on the public CVS site. We know that some people are creating their own "home-brew" Cider packages for other games, but they obviously cannot distribute these packages legally (in most countries, at least). It does take a fair bit of work to put together a custom package that actually works, and many of these apparently require hacked EXEs to get around other games' copy protection techniques.
We do make customizations to the Cider engine and optimizations for each game that we port, so these "home-brew" games will never be as high quality as they could be. At the moment, there isn't much of a real issue to be worried about. People have pirated software on every platform that's ever been made, so I don't see why Macs would be any different. Not that we condone software piracy (ahem, *copyright violations*, that is) by any means, but in this case, it's mostly a non-issue.
I'm not sure if that answers your question or not, but hopefully it clears it up a little bit. If a user wants to use only the LGPL parts of Cider, they will need to extract just those folders and leave the rest of the code alone. However, they'd probably have a hard time running a DirectX-based game without any of the D3D* libraries or many of the other non-LGPL pieces.
And maybe even get the answer back to the authors of those pages.
Anyone who speaks German is invited to respond to these types of articles and point them to our website and PR department. To my knowledge, I don't believe that these authors attempted to contact us prior to writing their articles.
That ought to calm the waters.
Nah, this is the Internet... there's always a storm brewing somewhere. ;-)
Jason Green Developer, TransGaming, Inc.