Re: WineX and the AFPL

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 02:35:35AM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
> 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.

You are making the wrong assumption here, with the "puts *all* of their
code". Both, cw and tg need to have their (well defined) bits of
proprietary code. With cw, it's the plugin code and the installer for
their two products. With tg, it's the 3d stuff. The danger of someone
building a competing product is small, for both companies, as they are
protected not only by their bits of code, but also (if not more) by their
*knowledge*. They are able to support their products, to improve them.
Anyone who wanted to set up by just copying their sources wouldn't be
able to *adequatly* support them (at least in the beginning, and this
would give cw and tg sufficient time to react).
To me, it looks like things started to go wrong when tg decided to not
release the install shield patches. It is understandable that Gav wanted
to recoup his investment on this, but it cost him the trust of some
of the big names on wine-devel. It has also led to him *not* getting
the money he hoped to get but also in additional cost for the
maintainance of the source for WineX, it was in short a miscalculation.
What I'm dreaming of, would be that tg went back to square one as far
as releasing the source for non 3d stuff under the wine license is
concerned and that the wine license would be relaxed as to allow
nda-based code to be put into proprietary versions of wine.

Just my 0.03€

  Ciao
         Jörg

PS: Please remove me from the header in case you reply, I *do* read the
  list.
PPS: What is still unclear to me is whether there have been serious talks
  about this between Gav and AJ during wineconf. There should have been,
  but to me, it looks like Gav let that chance go by.
--
Joerg Mayer                                          <[email protected]>
I found out that "pro" means "instead of" (as in proconsul). Now I know
what proactive means.