Re: Wine versions + future

Before starting to reply to some points, I want just to make my general
feelings known : in my case, I do not think that commercial development of
Wine should be more important than the destruction of the 'free'
developper's community around it. I.e. I prefer a project going slow but
with a lot of happy free-time developpers than one that goes faster but with
ONLY corporate people working on it (see what happenned to projects like
Plex86 that almost died due to the removal of Mandrake's sponsorship).

And this is why I am finally now pro-LGPL and not a X11 supporter as before
and why I find the TransGaming business model is fundamentally flawed in
this domain.

> My only logical explaination of Alexandre and CodeWeavers refusal to
> trade patches is that they somehow think they can eventually force
> Transgaming to adapt the LGPL. This is, if that is the case, flawed
> thinking. I'm pretty convinced that it won't happend.

Well, I think it is rather to take a stance. This means that, for example,
one can start working on Direct3D / DCOM in the WineHQ tree without fearing
a patch exchange in the following days invalidating all the work one does.

> The only thing that will happend IMHO is that Transgamings costs will
> increase and thus make it harder for Transgaming to survive. Surely this
> can't be in the benefit of Wine and especially not the Open Source
> movement as a whole. If people can play Windows games on Linux
> they are more likely to switch...

Well, this depends of your 'political' opinion.. Do you prefer a useful
non-free tool used by thousands or a free less usable tool used only by tens
of people ? I.e. are you part of the Linux camp of pragmatists or of the
Stallman camp of idealists :-)

Anyway, as a developper of Wine (as I almost never use Wine to run programs
:-) ) I am 100 % in the idealist camp.

                 Lionel (shutting up now)

-- 
		 Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/