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
I believe that here in Europe a crack doesn't have to be illegal. We should fix copy protection support but it is not trivial at all and various games use different protection schemes. Most games really don't work without a crack. Further there are protections like StarForce which we will never be able to support. Limiting apps with cracks to bronze is a bit hard in my opinion.
Roderick