The FLOSS ethos and the morality of Cedega

[Inversius]

Is it just me or are others concerned about the fact that TransGaming, which has 'borrowed' significantly from the WINE project, is not doing the community any favors? I could probably even swallow their proprietary approach if they just charged a moderate one-off fee for the use of their code, but no, users have to just keep on feeding the coins in the slot as the meter ticks. The very antithesis of FOSS.

The thing that really gets me is this nonsense about a 'community' they spout. Sure, they're happy to listen to what the suckers want - as long as the patsies keep feeding the coins that is. Community implies reciprocated altruism - there is no goodwill factor here, just the very worst of cynical capitalism.

While Gentoo and Debian were 'discouraged' from including Cedega in their repositories for fear of undermining TGs revenue, what about WINE's 'revenue'? Every minute gamers spend testing and posting on titles for Cedega, is time they have not spent on improving WINE, a true FLOSS app. Personally I'd rather boot Windows (gag!) than pay TG for the use of Cedega - at least MS don't pretend to be anything other than a pack of money crazed $*^%$#s!

[RealNC]

They should make a law against Cedega and also declare all our assets as public property and rename the country to Soviet States of America.

[L33F3R]

yea it was a shitty thing they did, but at the time it was under BSD or some similar license that didn't require them to open code.

best thing you can do is not buy it.

FOSS or Proprietary, I will use whatever is better. But this is a very low blow tho as far as morality goes.

All i can say is, oh well. Let them abuse it, nothing we can do. At least we can sleep at night knowing that we dont sink to such levels. Well. I cant, Im a frigin hellspawn.

[Inversius]

They should make a law against Cedega and also declare all our assets as public property and rename the country to Soviet States of America.

Have shares in Cedega do we?

Seriously though, I was commenting of the morality of a commercial enterprise profiting from community donated code, not on the evils of capitalism in general (That would be a whole other post ).

BTW Which country should we change the name of? This is an international community; I'm writing from Australia and the man himself comes from Finland for goodness sake

[Inversius]

At least we can sleep at night knowing that we dont sink to such levels. Well. I cant, Im a frigin hellspawn.

Hey, this has nothing to do with my own morality - I'm only comfortable commenting on the morality of others

[RealNC]

Have shares in Cedega do we?

Nope

Seriously though, I was commenting of the morality of a commercial enterprise profiting from community donated code, not on the evils of capitalism in general (That would be a whole other post ).

Well, they seem to submit code to Wine, even though they are not obliged to do it. And, after all, the Wine developers could do the same what the Cedega developers do. No one is holding them back. The difference is that Cedega's devs get paid. Perhaps that's why they do a better job

Money is good for software. Not always. But most of the time.

[Zhick]

Well, they seem to submit code to Wine, even though they are not obliged to do it.

From what I've gathered they pretty much stopped submitting code to wine when they changed their licence to the lgpl, and only recently started to do so again because they integrated some of wines lgpl'ed parts into Cedega again and thus were very much obliged to submit changes to those parts again (well, they don't need to submit them back, but to release them as well as lgpl):

TransGaming contributes any substantive changes to LGPL covered code to the Wine project (http://www.winehq.org), via the wine-devel and wine-patches mailing lists.

And, after all, the Wine developers could do the same what the Cedega developers do.

CrossOver anyone?

No one is holding them back. The difference is that Cedega's devs get paid. Perhaps that's why they do a better job Money is good for software. Not always. But most of the time.

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

[djack]

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

Or at least equally as good.

I used top be a Cedega subscriber (there - I admit it.. I feel much better now for getting that into the open). They consistently failed to get the games I wanted (mainly Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Planescape) working or make any visible progress into making them work.

The rift between them and Wine was one thing. To my mind, they didn't seem that bothered about pushing Windows gaming. They have 'ported' several games over to Mac using their version of winelib yet aside from The Sims (I think - correct me if I'm wrong pls) they haven't bothered doing anything like that on the Linux side to show Linux market potential.

[RealNC]

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

Yes, but how long did it take them? Years. The games I can now play fine in Wine were playable in Cedega years ago. Now they're old anyway

[Dragonlord]

There's a huge difference between the two. Cedega managed to get games working... but only THESE games. Wine is about making a general solution. Hence Cedega specialices on some games to make them run with game specific hacks but this is totally unsuitable for Wine as they do not want specific hacks but make a complete emulation. In this regard support Wine if you want to support any of the two since Cedega is a shitty bunch of single game hacks and not worth a dime in the end.