Re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-11 Thread Tom Wickline

On 4/10/07, Frank Russo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


I find myself in a similar dilemma...  What if a few of us banded
together and put a bounty on a feature / app, or contracted codeweavers
to implement it?  I think that would be great.  Assuming we can agree on
something we'd like to fund, it would be a little more targeted than
just voting in CW's appdb.


You have the capacity to pledge for a application or game in the CW
compatibility database. here is my personal favorite.

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=249;pledge=1




--tim






--
Tom Wickline

Respectable computing - Linux/FOSS




RE: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-10 Thread Frank Russo
Thank you for your comments, especially Stefan.  I'll pick up a copy of
crossover/linux and give it to the next person I have difficulty
converting due to "must have" productivity applications.

Thanx Again,
Frank Russo

-Original Message-
From: Tim Schmidt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 8:03 PM
To: Frank Russo
Cc: wine-devel@winehq.org
Subject: Re: Contributing money to WINE?

On 4/6/07, Frank Russo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As a WINE user, I find myself in a (seemingly) unique situation.  I'll

> do my best to explain my motivations, and what resources are at my 
> disposal.  Basically, I would like to give money to the WINE project.

I find myself in a similar dilemma...  What if a few of us banded
together and put a bounty on a feature / app, or contracted codeweavers
to implement it?  I think that would be great.  Assuming we can agree on
something we'd like to fund, it would be a little more targeted than
just voting in CW's appdb.

--tim




Re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Tim Schmidt

On 4/6/07, Dan Kegel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Lots of folks have thought about how to solve
the problem, but dealing with money is complicated.
It'd be better for you to donate time triaging bugs, IMHO.
( http://kegel.com/wine/qa/ )
Just reproduce one bugzilla entry a day for a week, and
document what you find, and we'd be very happy!


I'm actually in a position to do some of that on paid time...  So I
certainly will.  They'll all be for boring engineering apps, but hey,
a bug's a bug.

Even $8,000 doesn't sound impossible...  In fact, I'm sure that could
be raised in the name of a popular game.  $10,000 didn't turn out to
be too hard a figure to rustle up to buy 8800 cards for the nouveau
folks.  If there are a couple big-name games that are only a few
shared bugs away from working reasonably well, it might be do-able.  I
don't know enough about the bleeding edge state of Wine to know if
that situation might exist somewhere, however.

--tim




re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Dan Kegel

Tim wrote:

I find myself in a similar dilemma...  What if a few of us banded
together and put a bounty on a feature / app, or contracted
codeweavers to implement it?  I think that would be great.  Assuming
we can agree on something we'd like to fund, it would be a little more
targeted than just voting in CW's appdb.


Problem is, most of the things you might want to have
fixed are pretty expensive.  Let's say a bug takes ten
days to fix.  Assuming $100/hr (which is not far off for
contract development), that's $8K right there.

Lots of folks have thought about how to solve
the problem, but dealing with money is complicated.
It'd be better for you to donate time triaging bugs, IMHO.
( http://kegel.com/wine/qa/ )
Just reproduce one bugzilla entry a day for a week, and
document what you find, and we'd be very happy!




Bank account details (Re: Contributing money to WINE?)

2007-04-06 Thread Detlef Riekenberg
On Fr, 2007-04-06 at 19:30 +0200, Jan Zerebecki wrote:
> 
> Or at the bottom of http://www.winehq.org/site/contributing is an
> different way of payment.
> 
> I suppose it wouldn't hurt to add bank account details on that
> page, 

No!
Never!

You can use any bank account to pay something online, without
permission.
- The account Owner must detect, that someone payed something
  from the account
- The account Owner has the work, to get his Money back
- It's easy possible, that there is no way to get the Money back
  (Destination Account is gone, as Example) 



-- 
 
By by ... Detlef






Re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Tim Schmidt

On 4/6/07, Frank Russo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

As a WINE user, I find myself in a (seemingly) unique situation.  I'll
do my best to explain my motivations, and what resources are at my
disposal.  Basically, I would like to give money to the WINE project.


I find myself in a similar dilemma...  What if a few of us banded
together and put a bounty on a feature / app, or contracted
codeweavers to implement it?  I think that would be great.  Assuming
we can agree on something we'd like to fund, it would be a little more
targeted than just voting in CW's appdb.

--tim




Re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Jan Zerebecki
On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 02:38:42PM +0200, Frank Russo wrote:
> This
> way I can donate $5 per month, have it go "directly" to WINE development
> efforts (not beer, parties, conferences, etc), and have it pulled
> directly from an account that I hold (since I do not use Paypal for
> numerous reasons).

You can use the Paypal button without an Paypal account, you just
enter your bank account or credit card information (obviously you
need to be not logged in with Paypal).

Or at the bottom of http://www.winehq.org/site/contributing is an
different way of payment.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to add bank account details on that
page, so people can just transfer money directly (at least in
Europe, not sure how that works in the rest of the world) and
also set up interval transactions.

Probably a Google Checkout option wouldn't hurt either (
501(c)(3) tax exempt status need, which I guess we have ). (You
know, because of all those Paypal horror stories, though the
previous option is probably sufficient.)

> Is this an unreasonable request?

No, I can really understand that. Directly funding development
instead of other stuff is probably something that many people
want when donating. But it's probably something that would be
hard to do inside of Wine, which leads us to CW.

> Should I just
> "eat-it" and purchase a personal copy of CXO?  I guess I could give it
> as a gift to a friend or something...  I'd love to hear your opinions on
> the matter.

I can't think of any other way to fund wine development in a
general way. Though I would guess you probably also pay for
sending CW employees to the conference. Pledges with CW are
probably also a nice way.


Jan





Re: Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Stefan Dösinger
Am Freitag 06 April 2007 14:38 schrieb Frank Russo:

Beeing a Codeweavers employee myself my view on this matter is obviously 
biased. Just a disclaimer, that no one argues I'm hiding my own interests.

> Wine Party Fund:
> The purpose of the Wine Party Fund is to show appreciation to Wine
> developers by collecting funds for developer meetings, such as future
> Wine Conferences, or in some cases to purchase documentation.
>
>   That's fine and all, but I am looking for a way to contribute to
> the actual development (and only development).  If I wanted to buy
> someone beer, it would be an attractive woman (If Alexandre is a
> unisex/woman's name, I sincerely appologize).  Having been to a number
> of conferences, they don't stirke me as being of much value.  I want to
> pay for a developer, or rather his/her development time> . 
WineConf mainly serves to build up personal relationships between developers, 
to turn E-Mail addresses and IRC Nicks into actual human beeings. While the 
use of that can't be measured in lines of code it should not be 
underevaluated. I think creates a better and more productive development 
environment.

---
The rest is mainly confuse talk about payment and wine development.
---

>   This brings me to Codeweavers and Transgaming.  As far as I can
> tell, TG deosn't really give a whole heck of a lot back to the WINE
> project.  Purchasing a TG subscription really is not in anyone's best
> interests.  However, Codeweavers appears to do a whole lot.  The only
> problem is that I have no interest in their product, and purchasing it
> only funds WINE development indirectly/partially.  I also don't like
> their pricing model, since they require up-front payment for a product I
> won't ever use.
While TG's payment model has its own advantages for sure, CrossOver's upfront 
payment makes things much easier. We can ship CrossOver on CDs buyable in 
shops, less bureocracy, more freedom regarding the payment method(*). No 
issue if you want to terminate the subscription since there is no regular 
payment.

Most Wine developers are either hobbyists who want their favorite apps 
running(I started with Empire Earth, still doesn't run), or employed by 
CodeWeavers, a Linux company, or other companies. The Wine Project exists as 
a financial entity, but it does not employ developers. As you have noticed, 
the wine party fund is what it is - for funding parties.

But of course you can always pay any developer or company for doing the work 
you want. Regarding Games there are Henri Verbeet(d3d), Roderick 
Colenbrander(opengl), Fabian Bieler(d3d), Maarten Lankhorst(sound), 
Griswold(does the cursor stuff, don't know his real name), Chris 
Robinson(quatz, opengl), me(d3d), and a number of helpful users who test 
their games regularly and track down regressions if something breaks. Karsten 
Elfenbein mainly gets the credit for debugging Eve Online. All I did was to 
clean up his hacks and send them in for inclusion after there was a lot of 
demand for Eve Online support in CrossOver Mac. If someone wants to work on 
some games you like you can get in contact and agree on whatever you want to 
agree :-) . As far as I am concerned, you can buy CrossOver and vote on your 
games in our application database(right now eve online is the highest voted 
game), or pledge on a game(eve online beeing 2nd after some poker client).

Thanks for your interest in wine and your positive feedback :-)
Stefan


(*) This is what leads me to working on Wine. A few years back, aged 16, I 
wanted to run my games on Linux. Cedega looked promising, and $15 a worthy 
amount of money to spend to try it, and $5 per month is not really expensive 
IMO. Issue is just that at least here in Austria I couldn't get a Credit card 
to pay for cedega. Wine development didn't have an age tag on it, so thats 
the way I went(though it took me 2 years to really get started).


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Description: PGP signature



Contributing money to WINE?

2007-04-06 Thread Frank Russo
As a WINE user, I find myself in a (seemingly) unique situation.  I'll
do my best to explain my motivations, and what resources are at my
disposal.  Basically, I would like to give money to the WINE project.
 
I'm a home linux user, and a techops RHEL admin at work.  I have
no need for windows, MS Office, or other high priority applications.  I
do play Guild Wars and Eve Online and have been fairly active on AppDB
and bugzilla.  I have no desire to write and contribute code to the
project, as I would like to spend my home time playing Games and
avoiding development work.  Untill just recently, I was a Transgaming
subscriber.  I canceled my account the day that the 32-bit cursor patch
went into WINE git.  I would like to take the money that I had reserved
for transgaming and donate it to the WINE project.  Herein lies the
dilemma.

Looking at the contributions page, I am confronted by the
following:
 
Wine Party Fund:
The purpose of the Wine Party Fund is to show appreciation to Wine
developers by collecting funds for developer meetings, such as future
Wine Conferences, or in some cases to purchase documentation.

That's fine and all, but I am looking for a way to contribute to
the actual development (and only development).  If I wanted to buy
someone beer, it would be an attractive woman (If Alexandre is a
unisex/woman's name, I sincerely appologize).  Having been to a number
of conferences, they don't stirke me as being of much value.  I want to
pay for a developer, or rather his/her development time.
This brings me to Codeweavers and Transgaming.  As far as I can
tell, TG deosn't really give a whole heck of a lot back to the WINE
project.  Purchasing a TG subscription really is not in anyone's best
interests.  However, Codeweavers appears to do a whole lot.  The only
problem is that I have no interest in their product, and purchasing it
only funds WINE development indirectly/partially.  I also don't like
their pricing model, since they require up-front payment for a product I
won't ever use.
I would love to see WINE adopt a payment system like TG.  This
way I can donate $5 per month, have it go "directly" to WINE development
efforts (not beer, parties, conferences, etc), and have it pulled
directly from an account that I hold (since I do not use Paypal for
numerous reasons).  Is this an unreasonable request?  Should I just
"eat-it" and purchase a personal copy of CXO?  I guess I could give it
as a gift to a friend or something...  I'd love to hear your opinions on
the matter.

Thank you for your time,
Frank Russo