Am Freitag 06 April 2007 14:38 schrieb Frank Russo:
Beeing a Codeweavers employee myself my view on this matter is obviously biased. Just a disclaimer, that no one argues I'm hiding my own interests.
Wine Party Fund: The purpose of the Wine Party Fund is to show appreciation to Wine developers by collecting funds for developer meetings, such as future Wine Conferences, or in some cases to purchase documentation.
That's fine and all, but I am looking for a way to contribute to the actual development (and only development). If I wanted to buy someone beer, it would be an attractive woman (If Alexandre is a unisex/woman's name, I sincerely appologize). Having been to a number of conferences, they don't stirke me as being of much value. I want to pay for a developer, or rather his/her development time> .
WineConf mainly serves to build up personal relationships between developers, to turn E-Mail addresses and IRC Nicks into actual human beeings. While the use of that can't be measured in lines of code it should not be underevaluated. I think creates a better and more productive development environment.
--- The rest is mainly confuse talk about payment and wine development. ---
This brings me to Codeweavers and Transgaming. As far as I can tell, TG deosn't really give a whole heck of a lot back to the WINE project. Purchasing a TG subscription really is not in anyone's best interests. However, Codeweavers appears to do a whole lot. The only problem is that I have no interest in their product, and purchasing it only funds WINE development indirectly/partially. I also don't like their pricing model, since they require up-front payment for a product I won't ever use.
While TG's payment model has its own advantages for sure, CrossOver's upfront payment makes things much easier. We can ship CrossOver on CDs buyable in shops, less bureocracy, more freedom regarding the payment method(*). No issue if you want to terminate the subscription since there is no regular payment.
Most Wine developers are either hobbyists who want their favorite apps running(I started with Empire Earth, still doesn't run), or employed by CodeWeavers, a Linux company, or other companies. The Wine Project exists as a financial entity, but it does not employ developers. As you have noticed, the wine party fund is what it is - for funding parties.
But of course you can always pay any developer or company for doing the work you want. Regarding Games there are Henri Verbeet(d3d), Roderick Colenbrander(opengl), Fabian Bieler(d3d), Maarten Lankhorst(sound), Griswold(does the cursor stuff, don't know his real name), Chris Robinson(quatz, opengl), me(d3d), and a number of helpful users who test their games regularly and track down regressions if something breaks. Karsten Elfenbein mainly gets the credit for debugging Eve Online. All I did was to clean up his hacks and send them in for inclusion after there was a lot of demand for Eve Online support in CrossOver Mac. If someone wants to work on some games you like you can get in contact and agree on whatever you want to agree :-) . As far as I am concerned, you can buy CrossOver and vote on your games in our application database(right now eve online is the highest voted game), or pledge on a game(eve online beeing 2nd after some poker client).
Thanks for your interest in wine and your positive feedback :-) Stefan
(*) This is what leads me to working on Wine. A few years back, aged 16, I wanted to run my games on Linux. Cedega looked promising, and $15 a worthy amount of money to spend to try it, and $5 per month is not really expensive IMO. Issue is just that at least here in Austria I couldn't get a Credit card to pay for cedega. Wine development didn't have an age tag on it, so thats the way I went(though it took me 2 years to really get started).