Sorry to bother, but I can?t understand a lot of your double standards ... On the one hand develop a proprietary product "CrossOver Linux", but at the same time cooperating with the project "Wine" that's free. Wine could be today better than CrossOver Linux, but who knows, perhaps you are sabotaging and delaying the Wine project. I Don?t understand why you don?t develop software 100% free and paid, also you can charge for the tecnical support. thanks for reading ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-users/attachments/20110119/bf3b9c52/attachment.htm>
On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 20:28 -0300, Franky Travian wrote:> Sorry to bother, but I can?t understand a lot of your double > standards ... > > On the one hand develop a proprietary product "CrossOver Linux", but > at the same time cooperating with the project "Wine" that's free. >This is not an unusual approach for larger OSS projects. Take a look at RedHat (Fedora - free, RHEL - paid support), PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL - free, EnterpriseDB - paid extensions) and MySQL (free and paid-for versions). In all these cases there's a core of full-time developers who need to eat, hence the paid-for version. The usual effect is that those who get the 'free' software effectively pay for it by acting as beta testers while those who pay for the software or for support get a more stable version. Unlike proprietary packages, this split gives you the choice of paying or getting it free without stealing from the developers. Martin
don't forget that both projects benefit from this approach. WINE benefits from (at least part of) the work those paid developers do without having to pay them and CrossOver benefits from all those little improvements the WINE community adds. I don't think that in a pure retail approach, there would be so many volunteers helping in the project.
On 1/19/11 4:28 PM, Franky Travian wrote:> Sorry to bother, but I can?t understand a lot of your double standards ...There is no 'double standard'. Wine is a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project that has thousands of developers over time. CrossoverLinux/CrossoverMac is a commercial product that follows the LGPL code license for Wine source but has proprietary code that belongs to them. A good example is the X11 for Mac code that they developed and use that is not under the LGPL for either X11 or Wine.> On the one hand develop a proprietary product "CrossOver Linux", but at the same time cooperating with the project "Wine" that's free. >This is done all the time for FOSS projects. RedHat Linux is a commercial product. Community Linux OS (CentOS) is not. The difference is that CentOS does not have the proprietary packages created by RedHat.> Wine could be today better than CrossOver Linux, but who knows, perhaps you are sabotaging and delaying the Wine project. >No. Wine continuously improves. CrossOver freezes their code at a specific level and makes improvements to their code to run programs like Quicken 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010.> I Don?t understand why you don?t develop software 100% free and paid, also you can charge for the tecnical support. >Take a look at the RedHat model. The major difference is that RedHat provides extensive technical support where CentOS does and can not. Wine's major support people are users that have overcome problems and share with others. That is the beauty of FOSS. There is someone out there that wants their particular Windows program to run without error and they create the fixes to make it so, without breaking other programs.> thanks for reading ;)No problems. We do aim to explain the difference between the two projects. James McKenzie
Franky, the Crossover Office software and wine (latest stable branch) are almost identical, see http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/change_log/ , the main developers of both projects are also the same people. The difference is that CXO contains a better GUI, install scripts and a lot of specific hacks for supported applications, whilst wine is following a "no dirty hacks"-policy. Which means, that a fix for a problem will only make it into wine, if it isn't (obviously) breaking other apps. The disadvantage is that a lot more work, tests and "infrastructure" is needed, but almost all improvements in CXO are integrated in wine, after some time, i a clean way. You may consider this "no hacks"-policy as a subtle way to keep a business opportunity open, but it was already there before CXO, and it was established, because in the long run hacks need a lot more work and maintenance than doing it right(tm).
Other thing you missed lahmbi is that Code weavers trys to obey the no hacks policy as well. Yes they will break it to meet customer demard but will pay coders to create proper solution that is merge able into wine. Basically wine friendship is both directions. People like to forget about transgaming. Those truly did take wine extend and treat wine rules as something to be trampled over. Yes there are some good companies out there that treat open source projects with respect and care. And impressiveness still make a profit. Code weavers will also help companies port programs to Linux. Really Code Weavers relationship is very much like a Redhat relationship. Sometime I would love to see Code Weavers a with a more diffusivity.