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 

There is no reason to talk about the extreme cases.

The Wine project have both are very likely to have that for the
forseable future.

But sure I guess you are talking about DirectX. However DirectX
is not IMHO critical to the success on the Wine project.
This is something we can do later if we feel like it and are
unhappy with Transgaming's contributions. It is not a Wine 1.0
issue IMHO.

> (see what happenned to 
> projects like
> Plex86 that almost died due to the removal of Mandrake's sponsorship).

Since Plex86 is a highly complex project that only a few people
like Ulrich Weigand have the abillity to make useful contributions
to that is not very suprising.

In short. Bad example.

> 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.

From your point of view or from their?
 
> > 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.

Well, actually, there is no security even at that point.
Transgaming can release whatever they what under the LPGL
or the X11 license... Of course Alexandre can always say
no regardless. However that has nothing to do with the
license of Wine.

Then of course Microsoft can come along and release DCOM/.NET
or whatever under the X11 or the LGPL in order to have a stable
reference platform to lure some customers to stay on Windows or 
whatever. It not really like they can't afford it.

Beside speaking about trading you are aware that the more you do
on something that Transgaming have done the larger will their
willingness to trade be since before long their work will be
less useful to trade. See it like getting their larger work
for your smaller work + something else. 
 
> > 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 :-)

I'm a CYNICAL pragmatist. I mistrust the idealists, however not
so much their goals as their naive belief that their means will
accieve their goals.

Concretely in the Wine case I mean that while I understand and in 
part agree with the goals of the LGPL camp I very much mistrust
and disagree with the means (the LGPL + FUD about what the LGPL
really means) to accieve the goals.

Futhermore you must understand that few things that are wortwhile can
come without sacrifices. Sometimes you must sacrifice a thousand lifes
to save a million lifes. In less drastic term, sometimes you must cut
a thousand jobs to save a million jobs. 

No personal offense but:
In the concrete case of Wine I guess you could say that you and
Marcus was "sacrificed" to accieve a greater goal, that is to increase
the popularity of Linux as a gaming platform.

You can of course disagree with the morality of this especially
if you are in the idealists camp being a victim and all.
However in any case what Transgaming did was completly legal.

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

Actually I don't run applications under Wine that much either since
I have multiple computers. However it would be nice to get rid of
the Windows computer. Perhaps one day... before hell freezes. :-)