Lindows screenshots

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi,

I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows: 
www.lindows.com/screenshots

Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if - from the screenshots they're 
running either Office 2K or office XP, Internet Explorer, the fonts looks 
like MS TTF fonts, and I think those screenshots are modified a bit - look at 
the 2nd screenshots, behind the start menu - look at the "file/edit/view" 
menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some parts 
of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better shape 
then what is it today.

Hetz

[J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)]

Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's
they are breaking :)

M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like
windows? No chanec.

Which probably means we'll never see a line of code.. A) Because they'll
keep it to themselves, and B) because they'll be out of buisness within a
month of first sales.

Call me a cynic :p

Regards,        | Any significantly advanced technology is
                | indistinguishable from a perl script.
        Ender   |
  (James Brown) | [Nehahra, EasyCuts, PureLS, www.QuakeSrc.org]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 12:48:14 +0200
> From: Hetz Ben Hamo 
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: Lindows screenshots
>
> Hi,
>
> I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows:
> www.lindows.com/screenshots
>
> Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if - from the screenshots they're
> running either Office 2K or office XP, Internet Explorer, the fonts looks
> like MS TTF fonts, and I think those screenshots are modified a bit - look at
> the 2nd screenshots, behind the start menu - look at the "file/edit/view"
> menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some parts
> of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better shape
> then what is it today.
>
> Hetz

[Bill Medland]

"J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)"  wrote in message
news:[e-mail]...
> Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's
> they are breaking :)
>
> M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like
> windows? No chanec.

Did you notice that M$ are already on the offensive; they are going to court
over the name itself.

Bill

[Derek J Witt]

Yeah, M$ is claiming that they got -indows as a registered trademark.
But, they tried to register "Windows" (by itself) as a registered
trademark a few years back. But they got turned down because the word
"windows" is a common English word.   They cannot register word suffices
as registered trademarks IMO.

Personally, who is going to confuse between "Windows" and "Lindows?"  If
one isn't paying attention, they may sound similar, but in print, they are
unmistakingly different.

It's  yet another abuse of their monopoly status. Just my two cents worth.

**  Derek J Witt                                              **
*   Email: mailto:[e-mail]                           *
*   Home Page: http://www.flinthills.com/~djw/                 *
*** "...and on the eighth day, God met Bill Gates." - Unknown **

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Bill Medland wrote:
> Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 07:48:37 -0800
> From: Bill Medland 
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: Lindows screenshots
>
> "J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)"  wrote in message
> news:[e-mail]...
> > Thisn is going to be a fun one - think of all the M$ patents and EULA's
> > they are breaking :)
> >
> > M$ might leave us alone - but a competative product looking that much like
> > windows? No chanec.
>
> Did you notice that M$ are already on the offensive; they are going to court
> over the name itself.
>
> Bill

[Bill Medland]

"Hetz Ben Hamo"  wrote in message
news:[e-mail]...
> Hi,
>
> I just got this - Lindows released 2 screenshots of their Lindows:
> www.lindows.com/screenshots
>
> Now, IF they did use wine (and thats a big if

Why?  It looks to me like KDE & Wine and enough hard work to get a couple of
office apps up with some reasonable fonts (and the usual minimal touchup
work for marketing screenshots)

<Cut>
> menu - it should be alligned to the left) and they'll contribute some

parts
> of their wine to the standard wine - then wine will be in much better

shape
> then what is it today.

I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff
back?

Bill

[Bang Jun-Young]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff
> back?

What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable
time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P

Jun-Young

[Bill Medland]

"Bang Jun-Young"  wrote in message
news:20020108023339.A5460@krishna...
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> > I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff
> > back?
>
> What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable
> time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P

Sorry you took offence.

I am in awe of what the team have achieved since the early days and
impressed at how rapidly things appear to be moving at present.  I believe
in what Wine is doing, which is part of the reason why I am one of the
people working on it (although I don't do all that much).  I also get an
impression that much of the development is based on altruism rather than
financial concerns (which I guess is your point).

Wine is now getting to quite an advanced state and so begins to look
attractive to a lot of people.

We have just finished a major discussion of the license and are basically
going to leave it as it stands; at least that's my understanding.  (And I
agree with that)

Gavriel has been quite up-front about what TransGaming are doing, in a
business sense.  Basically when the company reaches the equivalent of about
$1million a year they can consider that they are recouping their investment
and can feel comfortable passing back significant code.  This implies to me
a sense of honesty tinged with realistic business sense.

Lindows, to the best of my knowledge, have made no such business committment
to Wine; they agree to abide by all licenses but, as we have just discussed,
the license does not require them to publish their source code.  Considering
their marketing etc. and their target market.I expect them to hang onto the
work they have done for quite a while before feeding it back to the Wine
tree.  Maybe I am wrong (and I hope I am) but what we have to recognise is
that Wine is now getting to the stage at which big business gets interested.

Bill

NB These are my own personal views..

[James Tabor]

Bang Jun-Young wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> > I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff
> > back?
>
> What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable
> time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P
>
> Jun-Young
>
> --
> Bang Jun-Young

Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the
work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone
else to use, including the source.

I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it
retroactive and enforce it.
James

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, James Tabor wrote:
> Bang Jun-Young wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:06:11AM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> > > I wouldn't hold my breath; why would they contribute the valuable stuff
> > > back?
> > What do you think of people that have contributed their invaluable
> > time/money/energy/passion/etc to Wine for last years? :P
> Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the
> work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone
> else to use, including the source.
> I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it
> retroactive and enforce it.

Once a license has been granted, it can't be unilaterally revoked.
Although going forward Wine could be distributed under a different license
than the present one, past decisions will stand.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

[J.Brown (Ender/Amigo)]

> Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the
> work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone
> else to use, including the source.
>
> I guess the project should change the license to LGPL and make it
> retroactive and enforce it.
> James

Well, I wouldn't go that far. But alas the Lindows work will probably
never see the light of day, according to the interview linked from
slashdot..

"While Lindows will be constructed on top of open-source software, some of
its key elements will be proprietary -- a strategy that will not make some
open-source advocates happy but which Robertson says is essential to
making the business work."

Similar to Transgaming, only it looks like they've made major progress in
making just everyday apps work.

Lindows screenshots AND THE WINE LICENSE

[Roland]

At 12:14 AM 1/10/02 +0000, James Tabor wrote:
> Personally I would be pissed off if someone is making money after all the
> work I had but into a "Free Project" assuming it would be free for everyone
> else to use, including the source.

To prevent this type of thing from happening is that the GPL was invented.
But that doesn't mean that the WINE license is bad. Lets be honest, if WINE 
was GPL, then Lindows would not exist, and WINE would be in the same 
developing state that it is now. Since WINE is not GPL, someone took his 
chance and created Lindows, and WINE is also in the same developing state, 
since that company didn't contribute anything back.
But, as you notice, this didn't make any difference for the status of WINE. 
As you see, with or without GPL(or LGPL) the developing state of the WINE 
project wouldn't change.

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.

Anyway, I'm  not unhappy with the WINE license. In fact, since most 
important open source projects are GPL, or LGPL, I think it is interesting 
to have some projects under a different license to see the practical 
implications this will have. I think WINE is a good study case for that. It 
will help us all to see the advantages and disadvantages of the GPL(LGPL) 
and draw conclusions for the future from that. Suppose that in a few years 
another Opensource project faces the question of what license it will need, 
then we can point back and say: look at the WINE project and what license 
they had and what happened to them, etc...

Just my 0.05$ Roland

Lindows screenshots AND THE WINE LICENSE

[David Elliott]

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