On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 12:57:16PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote: > On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:23:29AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: > > This seems like a pretty good example of how sometimes, distributing > > non-free software ultimately benefits... no one except for non-free > > software authors.
> So, if I understand what you're saying, you believe having win98 available > for anyone who wants to develop wine would tend to lock people into > using the non-free versions of windows? I believe that having Win98 freely available for anyone who wants to use it reduces the pool of people who want to *develop* Wine, because there is non-free software satisfies their needs as they themselves presently understand them. This is not without historical precedent in the Wine community itself; one of the greatest controversies in that community surrounded the experience of Transgaming, which distributed a non-free derivative of Wine under a "ransomware" license. The widely accepted analysis is that, because people *perceived* that the Transgaming code would eventually be made free because they would meet their sales goal (which never happened), development on the gaming APIs within Wine was set back by something like 1-2 years because there was no incentive to duplicate Transgaming's efforts. In reality, on the freeness metric, working on these APIs for Wine would have been no more a duplication of Transgaming's efforts than working on Wine in general was a duplication of Microsoft's efforts. If necessity is the mother of invention, then sometimes, meeting the immediate need stunts growth. > If so, that's an interesting assertion, but I don't really see why you > believe it's correct. Can you demonstrate that it's unequivocally incorrect? -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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