TransGaming and ReWind

Hi everyone,

The past several months have seen a dramatic change in Wine's license, and
TransGaming, like many others organizations, has had to take the time to consider
how the license changes impact us, our subscribers, and our partners. We have
also taken the time to listen carefully to the comments on the Wine-License
list, and those we have received in private emails.  Ultimately, we have a
responsibility to make pragmatic business decisions that will ensure the
continued growth of our company while also preserving the interests of our
supporters.

In an endeavour to bring a halt to the ongoing contention regarding the
license change, we have decided to concentrate our efforts on the ReWind tree.
We hope that developers who recognize the value of the contributions we have made
and are continuing to make will support us by making their patches available to
ReWind under the X11 license.

Over the next few days, we will be merging a number of contributions into ReWind,
including those that were initially offered for trade, as well as some things
that were not previously offered.  Some of the more exciting bits are the DIB
engine that we've been developing, as well as our new DCOM architecture.  The
new DCOM work eliminates many of the problems that the previous typelib-only
marshalling in both WineX and Wine had.  It supports inter-thread marshalling,
and will support application defined (non-typelib-based) marshallers, in addition
to the previous OLE Automation (typelib) marshallers. It also includes a preliminary
IDL compiler that is currently suitable for automatically building Wine-style COM
macro definitions from IDL.  The IDL compiler won't actually output marshalling
bytecode yet, however.

The new DCOM system is still a work in progress, and we are a little ways away
from fully supporting InstallShield 6 with it.  We hope that anyone interested
in DCOM and OLE support will work with us to improve it.  There are several things
that remain to be done (including the marshalling bytecode interpreter) that Ove
will elaborate on shortly.

Until the ReWind (and WineX) trees have better DLL separation support, TransGaming
will not be able to directly participate in any LGPLed development, due to the
legal and business considerations that we've discussed before.  Other developers
are of course free to integrate the work that we are contributing to ReWind into
the LGPLed Wine tree.

We will be working on DLL separation in the ReWind tree in order to be able to take
part in LGPLed development on a component by component basis in the future.  Any
assistance offered by other developers would be appreciated, including the
re-licensing of patches that are currently LGPL-only.  Without any help, it may
be some time before we are able to share any of our work directly with the
Wine tree.

We are continuing our participation in the development of ReWind and Wine to the
extent that our legal and business situation allows, and we are doing everything in
our power to offer Linux gamers the best possible solution for running the games
they want on the platform they love.  We greatly appreciate the support of not
only our subscribers and supporters, but of all the individuals and organizations
who have contributed to Wine over the years.  Through our joint efforts so far, we
have been able to bring hundreds of Windows games to Linux users' desktops, and
TransGaming has been able to contribute tens of thousands of lines of code to
the Wine project.  We look forward to continued collaboration.

Thanks,
      -Gav

-- 
Gavriel State, CEO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
http://www.transgaming.com/
[email protected]