Re: Funding software development?

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
[...]
> Right now the GPL is the underdog -- if it becomes the vast majority
> of all software, that could change all the rules.

This will not happen. The vast majority of software will never be made
public, much less GPLed. This is software which contains trade secrets.
For instance a bank would never reveal how it computes the credit rating
of its clients. Military would never make public the guidance software
for their missiles. Companies, big and small, will want to keep some
software seret, and will also need custom software.

There is room for all licenses, proprietary, *GPL, and *BSD. I don't see
how any of them can 'take over the world' and drive all others to
extinction. And thus you have to decide on a case by case basis which is
right. And thus you are back to square one:
> In my mind, the ONLY issue here is "what is best for the Wine
> project?"

With regard to the perenity of 'programmer' as a job, I am more worried
about either the death of Moore's law, or about 'artificial
intelligence' making programmers irrelevant, or at least transforming
our job so much that our current experience will be worthless, just like
it happened to telephone operators.


> The question about what other developers
> should do about Direct3D is valid, but ultimately it's up to them -- they
> can go ahead with work which may be duplicative, or continue waiting.  It's
> no different from a small company having to decide whether or not to work
> on a product when faced with a possible vaporware announcement from some
> competitor.  Yes, it's a difficult question.  That's life.

Companies get criticized for making vaporware announcements. Sometimes
they do it unintentionally (they hit more problems than expected and the
release is delayed), and sometimes they do it intentionally to stop
customers from buying their competitors products. When done
intentionally this is quite similar to FUD in that it certainly fosters
Uncertainty (should I buy product A or product B which the company says
is better and will come out soon).

And as you yourself pointed out this is similar to what Transgaming has
done... not to their customers but to the Wine community. And eventhough
I believe they did not do it intentionally, they get criticized, and
rightly so.


> As for the InstallShield issues, I don't see any indication that TG ever
> indicated that they would release any work in this area just because they
> were aided by others in the Wine project.

As I said:
> When Ove Kaaven ([email protected]) posted:
>
> (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2001/08/0035.html)
> > who will volunteer to reverse engineer these SLTG typelibs and make
> > Wine able to read them, so I can concentrate on the actual COM
> > marshaling stuff (which is pretty hard enough as it is), so we can
> > finally get those @#&% InstallShields up?
>
> And Huw started work on implementing SLTG support soon after, I
> thought, this was great: CodeWeavers and Transgaming working together
> for the benefit of Wine and all involved. This was in the true spirit
> of open-source collaboration. But apparently, the 'we' in 'so we can
> finally get those @#&% InstallShields up' meant 'Transgaming'. Or
> rather it turned that way as I seriously doubt this was what Ove
> originaly meant

> Maybe people jumped to that conclusion, but their original promise
> actually implied that most of their future code would also remain
> closed unless and until their subscription goals were met.

The way I read their original statement is that they would keep the
Direct3D code until their subscription quota was met but that the rest
of the code, e.g. COM, would be returned to Wine. Yes it is now obvious
that we (Me, CodeWeavers and the Wine community) were naive but then we
(the Wine community) learnt and switched to the LGPL.


> >  * Alexandre Julliard - Re: Problem with InstallShield
> >    http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002/05/0232.html
>
> This is an interesting post.  From this, it would appear that Alexandre
> really cares relatively little about the final result (the best possible
> Windows emulator), but rather on the process -- the journey to GET to that
> intended result.  Anything that makes the journey less enjoyable, he wants
> to avoid, whether or not it helps with the final result.

When you are dealing with volunteers, and any open-source project does,
if the journey is not enjoyable nobody will want to go through it and
you will get nowhere. Thus, if you want to reach your goal in an
open-source project, the journey has to be enjoyable.

This is actually even true for non open-source projects and work in
companies. If the pay is bad, your boss is a jerk, and rivalries run
deep in the company, then you will quickly jump ship in disgust. Even if
you care about what the company is doing (unless you are in a situation
where there is no greener pasture for you).

For open-source projects the risk of seeing volunteers jump ship is even
higher since it is very easy for them to do so, and since they can even
simply fork the project so that they get to run it the way they want and
still work towards the same goal.


--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
     Linux, WinNT, MS-DOS - also known as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.