Re: WineX and the AFPL

On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
[...]
> In the grand scheme of things, is DirectX really one of the most important
> things to be working on?  If it's more of a moving target than other areas,
> won't it take even more effort to keep up?

This is irrelevant.

In any open source project you cannot force a contributor to work on a
specific issue. This is true whether the contributor is an individual or
a company. You cannot force Guy Albertelli to work on the DIB engine
more than you can force Transgaming to work on making Wine ompile in
STRICT mode. Your only option is to take contributors and their
contributions as they come. Sure you can try to advocate a specific
issue as important, but as someone said, this is liking 'herding cats'.

So if you think there are more important aspects than DirectX, then say
which areas are more important, why, and try to convince others. But you
should not lament that an open-source project spent too many resources
on a specific area because their is not 'resource allocation' in the
first place.

Now if DirectX allows a whole class of applications to work in Wine,
then this opens Wine to many new users. And I hold the view that a
fraction of these users will then contribute to Wine, either as a
one-off or more on the long term. And this is benificial to Wine which
then makes DirectX important. Now whether this is *the most important*
thing to work on is debatable. Everyone tends to see their pet
application as *the one* application that Wine needs to become really
mainstream.


> The Wine project originally targeted 100% Windows 3.1 compatibility.  Now,
> it's too late for that to matter.  Achieving that original goal would be of
> very limited value now that Windows 3.1 is obsolete.

Yes, full 16-bit application compatibility (not Win 3.1 compatibility,
see below) has been deprioritized a long time ago. This is why you did
not see a Wine 1.0 version in 1995 with full support for 16-bit
applications (and only 16-bit applications).


> Today, having 100% compatibility with Windows 98 (or at least Windows
> 95) would be the minimum useful goal, but not for much longer.  By the
> time Microsoft is able to drop support for Windows 95/98, they'll have
> successfully raised the bar again, and Wine will have to retarget
> Windows NT/2000 or more likely XP instead, which will be
> correspondingly harder.
>
> At least basic Windows 95/98 support is a relatively stationary target, and
> has been for several years, because of the difficulty Microsoft has had in
> forcing upgrades on end users who consider Win95/98 "good enough".
[...]

No, you are mistaken. Wine has never intended to be a clone of a
specific Windows version. The only thing we care about is compatibility
with windows *applications*. This is quite an important distinction.
This means for instance that eventhough Win95 does not support Unicode
APIs, Wine does not return failure for Unicode APIs just because you
specify '--winver win95' (yes, I know, now it's in the config file).

So, this means it does not matter whether Windows 95 is or is not a
stationnary target. All that matters is that windows applications work
in Wine.  *This* is the target. So Microsoft may stop supporting
Win95/98 all they want. This will have no short term impact on the
applications out there, and thus on Wine. Similarly, MS can add 10000
new APIs in the next version of Windows, if no application uses them, it
does not matter either.

[...]
> I don't misunderstand open-source development.  I'm just saying that there
> may have been some gamers who looked like typical open-source developers,
> but were perhaps really just gamers following the most expedient means of
> meeting their specific goals, with no interest beyond that.  Most of the
> open-source developers out there, even if motivated by their own personal
> interests, tend not to be so single-minded about it.

Well, you at least give the impressions that you consider that
open-source projects can order contributors to work on specific issues
which is not the case as I have shown above. Also you seem to consider
that occasional/one-time contributors are some sort of second-class
contributors. Sure they may not get the prestige, 'status' or
recognition of 'core contributors'. But in the aggregate their
contributions are still very important. Even more so for a project like
Wine where contributors can only test with the applications they do have
and where these occasional contributors are critical for getting the
necessary breadth of application testing and support.

Thus they deserve your respect and support rather than hints and
allegations that they are not 'true' Wine contributors.


--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
     The software said it requires Win95 or better, so I installed Linux.