RE: Wine versions + future

> > - winex for gaming
> 
> Granted.
> 
> Personally, I agree that the idea of patch trading is fundimentally
> flawed.. however it may be a necessary evil to get some parts of
> Transgamings code into Wine proper... apart from redoing the work they
> have already done.
> 
> That said, I think its morally wrong. TG promised from the 
> beginning to
> release patches into Wine after they hit a certain, magical, hidden
> 'subscriber number'. This never happened, 

This HAVE happend. At least to some part.

> and is one of the primary
> reasons the LGPL switch had to be considered in the first 
> place. In that
> respect, it has worked - it has forced Transgaming to finally 
> offer their
> code publically. 

That depends on what you mean works.

Transgaming must pay their programmers somehow.
Having to give away (or trade) gives them nothing
to pay their programmers with.

I don't think they have that much money.
However they might have concluded that not trading might
be even worse so that is probably why Gavriel suggested it.

Trying to squeeze to much out them might force them to
bankrupcy and the Wine community will certainly not
gain from that.

> However its a matter of too little, too 
> late. The initial
> promise to release code had no 'release code IN EXCHANGE 
> FOR...' proviso.
> In this respect, TG has only themselves to blame, for waiting 
> until it was
> far too late.
> 
> Sorry Gav, I appretiate the work you do with Wine.. but by not keeping
> with that initial promise, and continously delaying with 'soon', you
> brought this side of things on yourself :)

Transgaming have released a lot thing to Wine as Gavriel himself have shown.

However you can't reasonably expect them to release everything.
They must have something to make money from.

Sure they could have release more, say, the DCOM stuff.
However see it from Transgaming's point of view.
There have been talking about switching to LGPL for quite some time,
many years. If and then that happend Transgaming might need something
to trade in order to get needed LGPL:ed code to be legal useable in
their tree. 

So in some meaning you could blame the LGPL camp for forcing Transgaming to
"horde" some of their code.

Note I'm not trying to shift blame. You must just realize that there is more
than one side of the coin.