On Friday March 28 2008 07:21:30 muncrief wrote: > 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. You are mistaken. As far as I know Codeweavers contribute ALL source code back to WINE (only exception is some hacks that aren't acceptable for WINE for obvious reasons; but this is very minor difference). You may ask, if so, why CrossOver exist? What is the difference between WINE and CrossOver, if Codeweavers contribute all their work to WINE? Well, CrossOver have some hacks that aren't acceptable for WINE (as I already said). But there is no much of them, so this is very minor difference. In fact, WINE often works *better* than CrossOver (CrossOver is always "behind" because it use somewhat old code-base of WINE). But CrossOver comes with commercial support, some additional GUI and this is main difference. Personally I used both WINE and CrossOver but in my case WINE worked better because of newer codebase, so I don't use CrossOver anymore (though I tried different version of its demo) and I like WINE more because it always newer and better. CrossOver in my opinion only can be better if you need some hacks that it offers or commercial user support. I don't need this so I'm using WINE. In other words, WINE is open source project and its functionality *isn't* limited because of existence of CrossOver. Just think about work made by Codeweavers like some kind of donation for WINE Project. > 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. You confusing some things. VMWare have *limited* (for commercial reasons) contribution to open-source. VMWare mostly offer commercial products. Codeweavers contribute all their code except hacks that aren't acceptable, and they *do* work to minimize number of hacks used by improving WINE. Codeweavers *aren't* owners of WINE. They are separate company. But they did a lot of donations (by sending patches) to WINE Project. There is another company, Transgaming. This is an example of company who have *limited* contribution to open-source for commercial reasons (like VMWare). They contributed very little of their work back to WINE Project - but they are using WINE for commercial purpose, and don't donate anything back (like patches or something else) for a long time. So, if you still didn't understand something - feel free to ask. But you must understand that Codeweavers are separate company who donate their work for WINE; they do not limit functionality of WINE itself, and they contribute their work back to WINE Project. So you see in news information about their products just for this reason - because they are donated a lot of their work for WINE Project. As you can see, both Wine project and Codeweaver are honest about what they do. You just misunderstood some things.
