Tom Wickline wrote:
At any rate you didn't answer the question of what will happen if wineThis is actually a very good point in favor of not charging money at all. If you charge money, you create obligation. That's the way the legal system works. If you do not, you can easily delist any known LGPL offender.
is ever hijacked. But I guess it could happen even without this
referral page, if it does ever happen lets just hope its not by
someone listed here.
Having said that, I think the focus on code contributions to wine may be exaggerated. Looking from what we know right now, there are just three companies that have the capability to change wine to fit a specific client. Of these three, CodeWeavers is the only one who is doing any significant work on wine on a regular basis. They may be some freelance work going on as well, but it seems to me most of it is for Code Weavers anyways.
Then again, it seems we have heard on this thread alone of three different companies that either package wine or play with it's deployment. As we learned at wineconf, not having these companies listed is a major hurdle for commercial Wine adoption, which is where money for more wine improvement ultimately comes from. This does tell us that worrying about LGPL violation should not be too serious. It seems that most commercial wine deployers don't mess with the code anyways.
But of course, $ 100 per year is a nice price, but than everybody can.....
Yea a nice referral for only $8.00 a month... hold on I just read
Brian's mail and now the cost has just went to $0.00 sign up now at
this everyday low price folks..
Now, you might say that I'm biased because I have an interest. That would certainly be true. After all, if David's company is listed, and they get much more business then they do today, as there are only three companies that can provide second tier support, I obviously stand to win. The thing is, that so does WineHQ. I don't think I have to convince anyone that I give back what I do (and sometimes fight Alexandre ferociously about getting it included), and so does Dimi. As for CodeWeavers, well, I don't think anyone involved with Wine can raise anything against them.
So, ultimately, we ALL get to win from getting more money into Wine, and charging an amount that will actually allow companies to get listed (and, yes, between zero and 100$/yr, zero is more flexibile to us in getting violators delisted without mucking with the legal system).
If that doesn't convince you, then try this for size. If we do charge 10K/yr, Lingnu will not be listed there. It's simply not worth it for me. If ANYONE is going to be listed there, then, it will be some huge company, with very little actual Wine involvement. Being as it is that Wine would like the commercial vendors listed too, I think that's a lose-lose. Don't you? Or do you really think that Lingnu is going to hold back code from Wine?
As far as I know, blender was sponsored by it's clients, not by the people who sold services for it. That is what, I believe, most free software will eventually gravitate towards. Wine, however, is not there yet. In fact, many wine hackers hardly even run wine.To bad this project will never have sponsoring like blender3d..
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Sponsoring_prospectus.58.0.html
Tom
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. Have you backed up today's work? http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html
