On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 11:40:54AM +0100, Fredrik Ohrn wrote:
Another observation is that companies in group 1 are in
direct competition
with each other, so they want closed source. If TransGaming
released their
DirectX work BSD style, Lindows would quickly be there to
appropriate it.
You miss one case here: Companies in group 1 that also want to make money with group 2s business model. They could do that easily and it would give them a distinct competitive advantage over the group 2 only type enterprises. Result: The group 2 only companies *can't* release their sources any more if they want to stay in business.
I'm not sure that I follow you. Groups 2 companies (like Corel) have one or more Windows application that are likely to be their primary source of income. How can group 1 (like CodeWeavers and Transgaming) companies compete with that? Sure they can compete other group 1 companies to get contract with the group 2 company. If the application was DirectX based I can imagine that Transgaming are likely to give a better bid. But I don't see how they compete with the group 2 company.
And in the example above I'm sure that Gavriel according to his promises will release any non-DirectX related stuff he had to do in order to fulfill the contract and if group 2 company is nice perhaps they might even require him to release some of the DirectX related code.