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
