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On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 08:15:08PM -0700, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Ove Kaaven <[email protected]> writes:
> If Transgaming is ready to change to a more open source model, I'm
> definitely willing to go out of my way to help them. As long as their
> model is "we take all we can and release as little as we can get away
> with", I have no interest in continuing such a one-sided "collaboration".
> And yes, strange as it may seem, having fun is more important to me
> than Transgaming's bottom line.
Let's suppose for a moment that *all* of your code for crossver office was fully
LGPL and that it's code was in the main wine tree, including the "dirty hacks we
don't want to put there". How would you feel if another company took all the
work you've done and decided to one-up you and put you out of business in just a
bit because they had huge amounts of money and with marketing power alone they
crushed you business wise while making very few actual contributions to the
code...
I guess the reason I'm asking is, suppose Transgaming puts *all* of their code
(minus the proprietary safedisc code, which they obviously cannot) into the wine
tree. What reason do people now have to subscribe to Transgaming? Not many. Now,
any wine based company can say 'we have gaming support!' without lifting a
finger. In my opinion, it's actually kinda nice right now, if you want to run
productivity apps, you purchase crossover stuff. If you want to game, you
purchase transgaming stuff. But once all the code's in one place, what reason do
I have to support any one specific company? And don't tell me goodwill either,
in the end users don't give a $$$$ about goodwill. All they care about is that
they can run X program. (Now I'm a little different, but I'm not the average
user.)
Or how would you feel if the complete source of crossover office was compiled as
a binary debian package and put in contrib so any debian user could just apt-get
install crossover-office? How many sales do you think the codeweavers people
would lose? I'm betting quite a bit. So while all of this lovely "freedom" stuff
sounds lovely. I'm still trying to see the real financial model in all of this,
maybe you can enlighten commercial software developers as to how they can make
a living writing software, if the software effectively doesn't cost anything?