wine users - Mar 2008 - Is Wine taking my donations and giving them to CrossOver?

Well I must say.

I certainly feel like a fool now.

I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to see a
blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who have
contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home page.

I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are employed by
CrossOver.

Is this legal?

To claim you are an open source project and take money from those contributing
in good faith, and give it to a private for profit company?.

I don't think so.

So I must be misunderstanding something.

Could someone please explain, clearly, whether Wine is an open source project or
not? And whether or not Wine purposely cripples it's game playing and other
capabilities so that CrossOver can prosper?

There must be a logical explanation, or people who were fooled into donating
would have sued Wine for fraud long ago.

the web page states
CodeWeavers proudly supports the Wine project.

so maybe since winehq.com is hosted by codeweavers as stated on the
right side of their homepage. maybe it is a swap wine advertises
codeweavers in exchange for hosting?

just a guess.


Sam Fourman Jr.

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:23 PM, muncrief <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> Well I must say.
>
>  I certainly feel like a fool now.
>
>  I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to
see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who
have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home
page.
>
CrossOver provides the servers for several of the wine pages.
>  I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are
employed by CrossOver.
>
>
>  Is this legal?
>
Yes. Unlike TransGaming, Crossover is helping to develop wine. This is
the same way redhat helps develop linux.
>
>  To claim you are an open source project and take money from those
contributing in good faith, and give it to a private for profit company?.
>
>  I don't think so.
>
>  So I must be misunderstanding something.
>
>  Could someone please explain, clearly, whether Wine is an open source
project or not?
>
Wine is definitely open source.
>
>And whether or not Wine purposely cripples it's game playing and
other capabilities so that CrossOver can prosper?
>
There is no intentional crippling of wine for CrossOver to prosper.

John

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:44:49PM -0400, John Drescher
wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:23 PM, muncrief <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> >
> >  Could someone please explain, clearly, whether Wine is an open source
project or not?
> >
> Wine is definitely open source.
As such, anyone is free to enhance it, and redistribute the enhanced 
system under any terms they want, providing they satisfy the 
requirements of the open-source licence.

-- hendrik

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 7:23 PM, muncrief <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
>  I have been contributing to Wine for about five months,
> and was shocked to see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver,
> who take the hard work of those who have contributed their intellect
> for free and sell it for profit, on your home page.
The company is Codeweavers, not crossover (crossover is their product).
And they are singlehandedly responsible for keeping Wine alive
and vibrant for the last six or so years.

So, if you like the Wine project, you should like Codeweavers.
It's that simple.
If they go out of business, Wine is in big trouble, IMHO.
- Dan

muncrief wrote:
> 
> I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to
see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who
have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home
page.
> 
> I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are
employed by CrossOver.
> 
> Is this legal?
Well as far a the license (LGPL) goes anyone can take Wine's code, modify it
a bit and sell it. As long as they make those modifications available to the
public. However Codeweavers are not just takers, they are the biggest giver to
the project who employs most active Wine developers. Who otherwise would not be
able to spend that much time on the project.

If you talking about donated money which go into "Wine party fund".
AFAIK that's not much money to pay even for one's developer full time
job. So the next best thing - that money is being used to organize Wine
conferences and pay some expenses for developers who can't do it themselves.

I never knew that codeweavers were such strong supporters of the Wine project.
However I downloaded the demo of Crossover Games last night and was very
successfull getting many of my games working with no problems.

In fact the "bottle" mechanism in Crossover lets me get over my
problems with OPENGL support needed for Eve which breaks another of my games in
Wine.

However after 2 long years as a cedega subscriber (and getting burned badly)
I'm very happy to support the WINE project. So not only will I be buying my
copy of Crossover but I will continue to contribute here and as an application
maintainer for Wine.

 8)

muncrief wrote:
> Well, I think I have a clearer picture of what is going on now.
> 
> And I thank all of you for your responses.
> 
> It appears that unfortunately there weren't enough open source software
users such as myself who actually donate what they can so that Wine could viably
exist, so Wine essentially became an R&D resource for CodeWeavers.
> 
> I have no problem with that.
> 
> The problem I have is that, of course, Wine is not an open source project.
And whether "official" or not, must offer something less than the
company that employs them.
> 
> So I will halt my donations to Wine, which were falsely solicited.
> 
> If you had been honest in the first place, I might have happily paid for
your products. I have given over $500.00 to VMware because they contribute to
the open source community, but are honest about what they do and do not take and
release to it.
> 
> But if you go to VMWare's home page you would never mistake them for an
open source project
> 
> But Wine's home page presents you as just that, and only that. You are
indeed misrepresenting yourselves.
> 
> And my original question was never answered.
> 
> Was the money I donated to a supposed open source project given to a for
profit company?

by your wording, I can see you don't understand at all what's going on
hehe...

simply put, WINE is an opensource project... all opensource projects depend on
the people that contribute to it and most of the time, people does this on their
free time and do not get paid for it

companies can use and/or sell opensource software themselves as is or as their
own product with their modifications... depending on the license under which
it's distributed, these companies have to opensource their modifications too
(this is the case with WINE under the LGPL)

so, companies using WINE must opensource their code too (this motivated the
short discussion with Parallels' people, who did not opensourced their
modifications at first)... but in Codeweavers' case, they take it ever
beyond this obligation...

not only they free their code, they employ WINE developers to further enhance
it. This means, people are being paid by Codeweavers on WINE, instead of just
waiting for them to have spare time to use to work on WINE

Codeweavers sell support and a somewhat ease of use for WINE and WINEPREFIX...
this is a common denominator on opensource-based companies. Red Hat, Ubuntu,
MySQL, PHP (Zend), the new Acquia with Drupal.... and many others

there's nothing wrong with this... it is actually desirable... companies
investing on opensource projects

you don't seem to understand also that VMware barely collaborates with the
community... only when it means good business with team... for example, they
wanted to make their VDI a standard on the linux kernel... a bait few took...

Codeweavers is an opensource "all-in" company (quite the contrary from
VMWare which is a 98% proprietary and closed company)... if you want to
contribute to some Virtual machine, I think you better check the opensource
VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org, instead of VMware

just as a little extra history, Transgaming and their product Cedega is based on
an very old version of WINE that had another license that allowed anyone to take
the code and close it... to prevent this, the LGPL was chosen for later versions
of WINE

>  The company is Codeweavers, not crossover (crossover is their product).
>
Sorry. I knew that I and I can not believe I repeated it from the
original post. Must have been doing too many things at once...

John

Dan Kegel miss the important thing about the wine party fund.  It is clearly
stored in the hards of a independent third party.

http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ <<  So how money is used from this
is above board.  Must be used for wine relegated things.  That may be
acquirement of key documentation or funding wine developer conference or even
helping developers without the money to get to a conference.   No all the
developers are paided well like the ones working at codeweavers.   I am very
thankful for codeweavers for providing core wine developers with a home.

Last time I looked codeweavers also covered the cost of the developers they pay
to go to confs.  Most likely still the case.  Since its advertising of the
existence of code weavers.

There are many more developers who are part times where the party fund is a
great help.

I think the confusion comes from the fact that code weavers will sell developer
time to get particular programs working in wine.  This is just good open source
business operations.   Biggest sell able item is time.

It would be interesting to have a value on code weavers yearly donations to wine
it would have to be a very large figure.  That money has to be recovered threw
some means.  As long as code weavers keeps on treating wine with respect and
care I will not have a problem with them.

Just for future reference Dotan Cohen I am a person who provides support in
#winehq on freenode.   I have to deal with these problems from time to time with
the codeweaver + wine relationship.   I don't have registration with the
wineusers mailing list since I get over 200 emails a day from my current mailing
lists so I use the forum.

Even I could have made a mistake and missed something important I would expect
Dan Kegel or others to pull me up on it.

Yes the information was on the other side of the link.  Problem you can never
trust user to go there and read it.

I have been using wine since 1995.  I would never normally attempt to insult Dan
Kegel.  Only reason is that we would have lost our cool with each other and
would need cooling off.  That would require a complete different of option.

I was in the wine-users mailing list under a different name that account is now
no more.

Sorry to say I am a blunt person my writing style reflects this.  So sometimes I
appear lot more insulting than what I am trying to be.

muncrief wrote:
> Well I must say.
>
> I certainly feel like a fool now.
>   
Don't.  Codeweavers sells a commercial version of Wine, much like Red 
Hat sells a commercial version of Linux.  Both contribute greatly to 
their respective projects.
> I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to
see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who
have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home
page.
>   
You have definitely been contributing to Wine.  Codeweavers may provide 
most of the support for Wine, but they do not contribute to all of the 
support needed.
> I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are
employed by CrossOver.
>   
Yes, they are.  Actually, they are employed by Codeweavers to work on 
the CrossOver project. 
> Is this legal?
>   
Yes.  It is legal to work for an employer that supports the project you 
love.  It is a great thing to be paid doing what you
love.
> To claim you are an open source project and take money from those
contributing in good faith, and give it to a private for profit company?.
>   
The Wine project does not do this.  They do, however, accept code 
updates from the CrossOver product as well as many other contributors 
(and I may be one of them.)
> I don't think so.
>
> So I must be misunderstanding something.
>   
You are.  So let us set the story straight.  Some of the Wine 
contributors work for CodeWeavers, who make a commercial product, 
CrossOver.  Any updates and fixes from CrossOver are fed back, almost 
immediately, to Wine.  This provides a great source of updates and in 
many cases, the fixes you want are produced by these fine folks.  
Without CodeWeavers and the CrossOver product, Wine would be basically 
non-existent and there would be no massive effort to bring the Windows 
API to Linux/UNIX.
> Could someone please explain, clearly, whether Wine is an open source
project or not? And whether or not Wine purposely cripples it's game playing
and other capabilities so that CrossOver can prosper?
>   
Wine is Open Source.  You can modify it any way you find meets your 
needs, within legal limits, and provide your updates back to the 
project.  Wine in no way or fashion is crippleware.
> There must be a logical explanation, or people who were fooled into
donating would have sued Wine for fraud long ago.
>
>
>   
Logical explaination:  Codeweavers is a company that produces a 
commercial product: CrossOver from the Wine base.  They also send any 
fixes back to that base.  Many of the folks at Codeweavers are Wine 
developers and programmers.  Without Codeweavers, Wine would not be 
where it is today.  The same could be said for Linux.  Without the 
popularity of Red Hat Linux and its derivatives (CentOS is only one of 
them), Linux would not be as popular today and as well built.

Thus, your monies are going to help support those areas of the Wine 
project that are not supported by Codeweavers.  If this were not true, 
both the Wine project and Codeweavers would be in legal trouble.


James McKenzie

On 28/03/2008, muncrief <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> Well I must say.
>  I certainly feel like a fool now.
>  I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was shocked to
see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of those who
have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on your home
page.
>  I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are
employed by CrossOver.
>  Is this legal?

I vote this thread "troll of the month."


- d.

David Gerard wrote:
> On 28/03/2008, muncrief <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> Well I must say.
>>  I certainly feel like a fool now.
>>  I have been contributing to Wine for about five months, and was
shocked to see a blatant advertisement for CrossOver, who take the hard work of
those who have contributed their intellect for free and sell it for profit, on
your home page.
>>  I then discovered through your own FAQ that most Wine developers are
employed by CrossOver.
>>  Is this legal?
>>     
>
>
> I vote this thread "troll of the month."
>
>
> - d.
>
>   
-1.  The OP had and probably still has a legitimate question about the 
use of his monies.  Hopefully the answers given here have changed 
his/her mind about donating to Wine and the role Codeweavers plays with 
the Wine project.  It certainly has changed mine (I donate time, which 
is the same as money.)

James McKenzie