Re: Transgaming's promises mean little (was: Re: bias...)

On 5 Jun 2002 [email protected] wrote:
[...]
> Now all we have is:
>
> "Our business objectives are quite simple: work with the most
> successful game developers in the world towards multi-platform
> releases of the most popular games; enrich the gaming experience for
> end-users by providing games on those platforms they wish to play."
>
> Evidently their business objectives no longer include contributing to
> Wine (or Rewind, for that matter), as neither are mentioned here.

I am actually quite happy with that. According to the above, now they
are working on a proprietary implementation of the DirectX API based on
the X11 ReWind tree. At least it does not create false expectation that
their code will be returned to Wine/ReWind in the near future.


[...]
> However -- nothing excuses Transgaming from this act of bad faith
> towards their subscribers!  If Transgaming had ever been sincere in
> its intention to return the Direct3D work to the wine project, there
> was no reason to retract this promise.

When things don't work out the way they want, companies sometimes have
to change their business model. Sure this is tough for their subscribers
and they should definitely send them an email of some form to announce
the change (which maybe they did). But you have to give them some
leeway.


[...]
> Instead we now have this surreptitious retraction of their promise to
> the community of developers and users :-(

It may be better to not promise anything than to make a promise which
you know you are very unlikely to ever be able to hold.


> Personally, I do not believe
> that Transgaming ever had any intention of releasing the Direct3D code

I disagree. Call me naive if you want, but I believe that Gavriel State
and Transgaming were sincere (though I obviously cannot prove it) and
that they have attenuating circumstances.

The source of their problems is that things did not work out the way
they expected or are taking much longer than expected.  The issue wrt.
Wine is the way they handled this change in circumstances. They should
have kept the Wine community informed of their difficulty to reach the
set number of subscribers.  Publishing their subscriber numbers as you
suggested would have been the best way to do so. But that's a difficult
decision to take for a company.


[...]
> Nor is this the only example of Transgaming's insincerity --
[...]
> Unfortunately, it appears that Transgaming has no intention of
> allowing anyone to make use of their software under the AFPL -- the
> rights that were granted are illusory, and will be taken away as soon
> as someone tries to exercise them.

Yes, I find this quite upsetting too. And I have stronger doubts about
them ever intending to let others ditribute binaries of their AFPL tree.


[...]
> Since there is no long-term prospect of
> being able to release updated packages of the code due to this threat,
> it's not worth anyone's time and effort to bother doing so in the
> first place.  Needless to say, Debian's developers decided not to
> bother packaging the AFPLed code, and Transgaming got what it wanted
> without changing the license.  This allows Transgaming to persist in
> maintaining the illusion that they are some type of "open source"
> company, while being wholly proprietary in practice.

I think it would be good to clarify the situation. And if the only way
to clarify it is to actually package their AFPL tree for Debian then I
believe it would be worth it.


> Rewind was established over two
> months ago, yet most (if not all) of the code contributed so far
> appears to have been lifted from the wine-patches mailing list.

Transgaming cornered themselves. If they contribute patches to the
ReWind tree, then then cannot trade them against Wine patches.


--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                Linux: It is now safe to turn on your computer.