Re: Funding software development?

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Deven T. Corzine wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Francois Gouget wrote:
[...]
> Certainly there would always be some enclaves of secret code, but maybe
> less than you think.  The Navy has already built at least one "smart" ship
> (that ironically ended up dead in the water) based on Windows NT.

And which proportion of code did NT represent? I am sure it really was
not that much. So I think it is you who are overestimating it. But of
course that's just my opinion against yours.


> > 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.
>
> It's not necessary to drive other licenses and truly free software to
> extinction.  It's only necessary to drive them to irrelevance.  That's a
> very different matter.

And what do you mean by 'irrelevance'? And how is that a bad thing if
there are still numerous widely used project using such licenses?


> > 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.
>
> Rightly so?  Is it really Transgaming's fault if the users aren't willing
> to support development?

No. But their handling of the situation is their doing.


> From what I've seen, it appears that if anyone has the right to be bitter,
> it's Transgaming and its too-few subscribers, not the whole Wine community.

Yes they may be bitter that they did not have the number of subscribers
that they expected but I don't see how that's the Wine community's fault
since it defacto went as far as to not give them any competition.


> > 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.
>
> So it's Transgaming's fault that you misread their statement?

Did I? Again, I don't think so. Did I mis-read Ove's email? I don't
think so either.


> If their business model fails, so be it.  However, it's one of those models
> that sounds great on paper, which Open Source advocates have encouraged
> companies to pursue.  Now, a company tries to pursue it, and gets attacked
> by the community in the end.  Why?  Because not enough people wanted to
> support the model to make it viable.  Yet, despite this lack of support
> from the community, the community nevertheless demands that Transgaming
> should still follow through on their end of a bargain never executed?

I don't. I would be quite happy if Transgaming apologized to their
subscribers and declared that their Direct3D implementation and their
future developments are proprietary and will remain so for the forseable
future. Add to that a license change from the AFPL to one that forbids
redistribution of WineX binaries (which is effectively their intent)
and I would be happy.

We would then have a clear situation where the Wine and ReWind community
both know where they stand. This would not prevent them from making
contributions to Wine or ReWind, but at least it would not create and
nurture false expectations.

Now I think that with their recent statement their are making a step in
the right direction.


> This is certainly true when the project depends entirely on volunteers,
> unless those volunteers are so invested in seeing the results that they'll
> endure unenjoyable work to achieve them...

If you follow this philosophy, good luck with Gangplank!


--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                            1 + e ^ ( i * pi ) = 0