Re: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias)

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, John Alvord wrote:

> The current TG stance is in question, since the 20,000 offer is no
> longer mentioned on the web page. A new subscriber can have no
> confidence that his $$$ would count toward that goal. Realistically,
> the time for that offer has expired. Software which might be released
> in 6-7 more years (optimistically assuming a linear rate) has almost
> no practical value to a project like Wine.

None of the 3,000+ earlier subscribers had any assurances either.  Life is 
doubly unfair to them, if the threshold is never met, yet they did their 
part.  Also, there's no basis to assume a linear rate -- it could explode 
tomorrow, or it may have levelled off already if they've saturated their 
target market.  Without knowing what a "typical" adoption curve would look 
like (which I don't think we can know yet) or this example, it's purely a 
guess whether it would take another few months or many years to reach their 
goal of 20,000 subscribers.

But at a guess, I doubt it would be less than another year or two.  That's 
just a hunch; I have nothing to back it up.  Maybe they'll never reach it.

> Given that TG has dropped its offer, and has recently added a bunch of
> its non-strategic code to the ReWind tree, whence it showed up on
> wine-patches soon after... maybe they are working on a newer business
> model, as yet undisclosed.

They've never officially rescinded that offer, to my knowledge.  It's true 
that they're no longer seem to be publishing it, but we can't jump to the 
conclusion that they don't intend to honor their pledge if the threshold is 
reached.  It does suggest that they're no longer relying on that approach.
It would be helpful if they clarify their stance on the original pledge...

As for their new business model, the new webpage says they're trying to 
partner with the game publishers themselves.  This seems like a good idea, 
since they could (theoretically) hope to get a "Linux" version released 
with WineX distributed in the box, much like Corel's WordPerfect Office 
2000 for Linux.  This could be much more profitable than the subscription 
approach, IF the game publishers see a viable Linux market for their games.  
(Of course, with the failure of Loki, that's no certainty...)

Even if they pursue a new business model, they may still honor their 
original pledge.  In fact, if they can sustain their business through those 
game developers, they may switch entirely to X11 or LGPL licensing.  This 
would represent yet another proprietary/free hybrid business model, like 
Sleepycat, Aladdin and others.  Hybrid models have proven successful only 
because they can extract enough money from proprietary interests to fund 
(subsidize) the free software development...

It will be interesting to see if Transgaming suceeds in this approach.

Deven