I'm writing this at the start of a new year. I'm back to work and getting into gear for 2003, having taken on the mammoth task of arranging training courseware for the curriculum for Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certification. I've been instructing Linux training courses for quite some time, but demands spiked quite a bit in the last half year, and we've bumped up our training facilities and courses to boot. Additionally, we'll likely be publishing our courseware online later this year under the Open Content License, so stay tuned. . .
Meanwhile, one of the highlights of my holidays was a rather pleasant boxing day LAN party organised by some friends from the Linux Gamers League – a group of loosely associated gamers who meet regularly online (fire up Xchat and check them out on irc.freenode.net #lgl if you're interested). The LAN consisted of various Linux games including UT2003, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III, and various mods for these games, including the excellent Urban Terror. Additionally, we played WarCraft III, a game that doesn't have an official Linux version, using WineX.
I've mentioned WineX briefly in the column before. It's a Win32 compatibility layer for Linux, allowing you to run a variety of Windows/DirectX games on your favorite distro. WineX setup was simple: just download and install the packages from www.transgaming.com, make sure there's enough space on the partition containing /home (or symlink /home/yourname /.transgaming to another directory) for your Windows software, run the game installer with a command like winex /mnt/cdrom/setup.exe. The installer proceeds as normal, and when finished, you can launch the application from the shortcut placed on your KDE or Gnome desktop.
Although WineX is open source, you'll get much, much more out of it if you 'subscribe' for five US dollars per month. Subscription allows you to download packages of the latest official release (and use them forever), support, and the ability to vote on which games and features the developer (a Canadian company called Transgaming) works on next. My experiences with WarCraft III and other games on the subscriber version of WineX were incredibly smooth, but it seems those using the non-subscriber version don't appear to have quite the same experiences.
For those who want a taste of WineX before forking over their cash, Transgaming make its source code repository (CVS) available to any and all non-subscribers.
There are two main problems here: installing unpackaged software from CVS isn't great in terms of ease of use or maintenance (the software is difficult to uninstall and keep track of) and what you pull from CVS isn't officially tested or supported code, and may or may not work at any point.
You can fix the former problem by creating your own packages, but here's the rub: whenever someone distributes neat packages of WineX CVS, the company threatens to make WineX non-open source.
Packaging and distributing the non-subscription version doesn't violate the Aladdin Public Source License, but it does deter people from subscribing – hence I can understand Transgaming's reaction.
But what's the point of having an open source app if you can't take advantage of all the freedoms that license implies?
And again, given the freely available version is in perpetual beta, and lacks copy protection support needed to play some games, it can often be quite difficult to get the package working.
This is compounded by the fact that the people who demand the most out of Linux as a multimedia platform are often those newest to the system – and need polished, simple software. In the end, the free version of WineX leaves users with an impression that WineX is a lot more of a hassle than it really is. There must be a better way of doing things.
The Alternative
So Transgaming needs to provide an incentive for potential customers to subscribe. But it also needs to provide the public with a compelling, working demonstration of its product.
I think the company would be served much better if it distributed three separate packages of WineX:
- A working, tested package of a nine-to tweleve-month old WineX under an Open Source license for non-subscribers to trial the product.
This release would include a list of older but well known games that are known to work with the product (and maybe a neat little app to easily download demo versions of those games).
- A separate package containing libraries necessary for WineX to implement copy protection used on some Windows games. By agreements with Macrovision and Safedisc, these must be closed source. This package should be freely downloadable from the Transgaming Website. Including copy protection is a separate package means the non-subscriber version can be included out of the box in Linux distributions that only ship open source software (the app can prompt users to download the copy protection support package themselves when/if they need it).
- A package of the current release WineX for subscribers, under a non-Open Source license (maybe including access to source code, but not redistribution rights).
People looking to try WineX can use the non-subscriber version free, and get a good idea of WineX's capabilities with a simple-to-install, tested version that runs older but fun games like Diablo II, Half-Life, Everquest, etc.
The non-subscriber version would make sure that whenever non-subscribers quit their app, they're informed that they if they subscribed they would get to run WarCraft III, Battlefield 1942, Sims Online, and other big name current release games, as well as get support, influence and fund future development of the program.
The full version would be exactly that, and as time moves on, both the subscriber and non-subscriber versions would be updated, both to play more games.
Yes, that means the non-subscriber WineX wouldn't be open source. But is that any different from what it currently is? Transgaming's statements that it'll close the source if people start to make builds of the non-subscriber version better and easier to use means that people can't take advantage of the freedoms of open source anyway – currently, it may as well be proprietary.
The benefits for Transgaming of the proposed idea are obvious – by providing the potential customers with a simpler demo version whose limitations are a lot more understandable than the CVS version, it will be able to more effectively show off its product. The licensing would allow it to get its non-subscriber WineX into more Linux distributions, and it could gain more exposure for its product.
Transgaming would also possibly get some more goodwill from the open source community, who are generally happy to pay for something from a company that contributes to a recognisable open source project (or work on it itself).
Nor is this idea a new one: Aladdin Systems, the company behind Open Source Postscript implementation called Ghostscript (the application suite behind all the PDF generation, conversion and viewing apps on Linux) have a similar business model, which has worked well for a number of years.
Journaling
I've recently fallen into the habit of maintaining an online journal – to record activities and thoughts, waste time, rant, catch up with friends, and organise my social life (which oddly seems to include a lot of other people who like to rant online).
There are many journalling, or weblog clients out there and one of the oldest and most popular online journal sites is Livejournal.
Livejournal works a little like