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