As a WINE user, I find myself in a (seemingly) unique situation. I'll do my best to explain my motivations, and what resources are at my disposal. Basically, I would like to give money to the WINE project.
I'm a home linux user, and a techops RHEL admin at work. I have no need for windows, MS Office, or other high priority applications. I do play Guild Wars and Eve Online and have been fairly active on AppDB and bugzilla. I have no desire to write and contribute code to the project, as I would like to spend my home time playing Games and avoiding development work. Untill just recently, I was a Transgaming subscriber. I canceled my account the day that the 32-bit cursor patch went into WINE git. I would like to take the money that I had reserved for transgaming and donate it to the WINE project. Herein lies the dilemma.
Looking at the contributions page, I am confronted by the following:
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. 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. I would love to see WINE adopt a payment system like TG. This way I can donate $5 per month, have it go "directly" to WINE development efforts (not beer, parties, conferences, etc), and have it pulled directly from an account that I hold (since I do not use Paypal for numerous reasons). Is this an unreasonable request? Should I just "eat-it" and purchase a personal copy of CXO? I guess I could give it as a gift to a friend or something... I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter.
Thank you for your time, Frank Russo