Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes the Mozilla ActiveX Control

Hi Mike,

On Monday 28 November 2005 18:46, Mike Hearn wrote:
> [...]
> > Everyone is happy and it works.
>
> Sorry. My actual experience of being a real world upstream developer in
> several different projects is that everybody is not happy and the system
> does not work.
>
> More, for programs like Wine that are completely standalone I do
> not see what value this system of packagers provides. It only adds work,
> and thanks to things like freedesktop.org standards the software can be
> installed from source in the exactly the same way everywhere and it works
> just as well (or better).

Ok, if anyone has objections: Reading this, the distributors in common should 
remove the wine source from their repositories and provide instead a small 
package with a single shellscript which is named: /usr/bin/wine

When the user execute this script, there will be a dialogbox with the 
following information:

"Dear User, you wanted to execute 'wine - the windows program loader', but  
sadly the authors of this software are thinking, that we, [Ubuntu, Debian, 
RedHat, SuSE, Mandriva, insert your fav. distro here], are not able to ship 
this software, as good as it should be. The authors of this software are 
thinking, too, that it is better for them to compile this software by 
yourself, or download a binary package from their website. 
Despite the fact, dear User, that you don't know how to compile software, or 
that you can break your distributors package managing system, we will forward 
you now to the website of the wine project, so that you are able to download 
your software. 
Please be aware if you install this software via binary installation from this 
side, or you are compiling this software the non distribution way, you will 
lose all [commercial] support options from us. 
To get support after all, please write to support at winehq.com. Thank you."

I wonder, where projects like gnome or kde would be today without the help of 
the packagers and distributors. 
If the attitude of other software authors towards packagers and distributors 
are similar as yours, I think then we can forget all about OpenSource and 
creating an alternative towards Windows.
Well, even your application is then totally obsolete.

Anyways, this discussion is going away from the essential discussion, so this 
is the last post of mine, because this is ubuntu-devel.

Thanks Scott for raising this licensing issue and thanks Mike for your 
detailed views of being a real world upstream.

Regards,
\sh

PS: Please read this with a bit of humor, irony and sarcasm. I mention this 
here, because I intend to forget smilies.
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