I find this story spin deeply offensive and highly misleading.
Let's start at the bottom, because that's the one that offends me so mightily.
My blog is pointed to, with a caption 'adverse commercial agenda'. In that
self same blog post, I refer to the energy we put into the DIB engine - I paid
Huw to work on the DIB engine for six months. In fact, CodeWeavers has
had the highly unenviable job of doing the long, hard dirty jobs that no one else
wants to do, because they're not fun. (Can you say "COM", boys and girls).
CodeWeavers contributes all of its patches to Wine first, and if you look
at the top contributors to the Wine project throughout its lifetime, you
will find a stunning number of CodeWeavers people. I find it personally insulting
to the many people at CodeWeavers that have worked so very hard on Wine,
often for very little pay, to imply that we have an evil agenda. We don't. We do
want to make a living. We do put our customers ahead of shills on mailing lists.
We do sometimes focus on making CrossOver better for specific tasks, but at all
times our core mission remains making Wine better.
The proposed 'wonder' patch is based upon solid work by Jesse Allen, along with some of the work
we paid Huw to do. And, in fact, it does some nifty things, because the author went
after the fun cool part of the task, and ignored the long, hard, nasty part of
the task. Indeed, the author repeatedly refuses to consider Alexandre's
requirements for doing it right. Max has not 'satisfied all requirements set'.
In fact, if you read
this post, you'll see that Max has no interest in implementing the DIB Engine in
the fashion that Alexandre has requested - it's too much work.
Wine has come a long way in the past 8-10 years - anyone who has used Wine lately
can tell you how amazing it is becoming. This is largely driven by the ever
increasing standard that Alexandre is using - the bar for patches, particularly against
stable and well tested code - is becoming very high. This is a Good Thing (TM).
And finally, up to the top, this phrase is troubling:
'the dissatisfaction of core developers with the arbitrary project governance'.
Once a year, the core Wine developers get together at
WineConf.
We often have a topic called 'Wine governance', where we have great fun lampooning
Alexandre. (He certainly is terse, and can be incredibly maddening). But the overwhelming
and unanimous consensus, year over year, is that he does a damn fine job and that the
Wine project is lucky to have him.
Change that to be 'the dissatisfaction of a bunch of vocal people on the mailing
list, who don't really understand the technical issues at hand, but think they're missing out
on a cool shiny' and now you have an accurate
statement.
Cheers,
Jeremy
