[Wine] CrossOver Linux Vs. Wine

[Martin Gregorie]

On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 20:28 -0300, Franky Travian wrote:
> Sorry to bother, but I can’t understand a lot of your double
> standards ...
> 
> On the one hand develop a proprietary product "CrossOver Linux", but
> at the same time cooperating with the project "Wine" that's free.
> 
This is not an unusual approach for larger OSS projects. Take a look at
RedHat (Fedora - free, RHEL - paid support), PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL -
free, EnterpriseDB - paid extensions) and MySQL (free and paid-for
versions).

In all these cases there's a core of full-time developers who need to
eat, hence the paid-for version. The usual effect is that those who get
the 'free' software effectively pay for it by acting as beta testers
while those who pay for the software or for support get a more stable
version.

Unlike proprietary packages, this split gives you the choice of paying
or getting it free without stealing from the developers.


Martin