Re: Commercial code is better: Cedega VS Wine

[Alan Mackenzie]

Karen Hill <karen_hill22@yahoo.com> wrote on 7 Mar 2006 16:05:39 -0800:
> Tried running a modern game in Cedega and it worked.  In Wine it seg
> faulted.  Cedega is a commercial closed source port of Wine.  Wine is
> free.

Never heard of Cedega.  Haven't a clue how you'd even pronounce it.  I do
hope you had the decency to send Wine a bug report.

>From now on, you're trolling, aren't you?  Still, I'll feed you once.

> Commercial for profit developers create software that works better in
> Linux than unpaid developers.

Good well motivated developers working in good conditions produce good
software.  Sometimes.

> The only reason the Linux kernel is even halfway decent for a _unix_
> system is because of Redhat.

Linux kernels aren't used on _unix_ systems.  But no, the Linux kernel
was more than half decent before Red Hat came to be.

> Redhat charges an arm + leg for their Distro to pay the top guys like
> Tom Lane to work on Postgres and Alan Cox to work on Linux.

Without Red Hat, these guys would still be working on Linux.  It's great
that they get some money out of it, though.

> Remember XEmacs VS Emacs?  Stallman was almost crying because the
> XEmacs team was backed by a commercial venture and the old emacs could
> barely keep up.

That's not quite accurate.  "Old" Emacs has kept up, more than barely,
and surged ahead.  Probably, the tears were because the deepest principle
of freedom was understood differently by RMS and his fellow hackers, but
those differences hadn't manifested themselves before.

> XEmacs cost about a million dollars to create.

A figure plucked out of the air?

> In some of the mailing lists, stallman admitted that he couldn't even
> understand some of the code because it was so advanced and he feared
> emacs would fall really behind.

RMS will only allow well written code into GNU Emacs.  If it's not
readily understandable, then it's too complex to maintain, and quite
likely, too complex to use.  Often, he's rejected proposed features,
saying "yes that's fine, but we don't really need it".  XEmacs has
suffered from accepting "advanced" code from people who have subsequently
vanished, leaving their bugs behind.

> Why try to fight this reality?  Why not admit "Free" software is
> impossible?

Funny, that - My computer OS is free software, I'm writing this article
with free software, and it will get dispatched into Usenet by Free
software, and I write free software.  Hey, that's four impossible things,
and before breakfast.  The red queen would be proud of me!

> The best software is commercial where people vote with their wallets.

The best software is the stuff that works.

> Until there is a Free Doctors Foundation, Free Food Foundation, Free
> Car Foundation, and Free Housing Foundation the will not be a quailty
> free software product that is not restricted by commercial interests.

There's an _excellent_ free program called ispell, by the way.  ;-)

> Redhat does not allow you to use their distro for free.  You must
> modify all logos etc.  For the price of one year of Redhat service you
> could buy Windows 2003 Server which is supported for 7 years.

For some value of "supported", and some value of "7 years".

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").