Re: Bugs in wine. Any alternatives?

On Tue, 2022-10-25 at 10:55 -0700, ToddAndMargo via users wrote: > Wine is the bad side of the open source model. > Give the software away for free, then hold the > user for ransom if they want the bugs fixed. > Libre Office does the same thing. Fedroa > does not and spoils all of us. In the past, if I'd posted any bug reports (on any software), it was virtually expected that I also supply the fix. Umm, no. That's what things like GIT are for, user-participation in program changes. Bugzilla is for user-participation in debugging. I have no qualms about doing follow-up tests and trying alternative recompiled files. But that was way too far. There was a certain attitude of: How dare you criticize us for adding yet another bug report to (the hundred prior reports) on something we haven't bothered to do anything about in 8 years. You're such a user for not contributing. Do you have any idea how hard it is to create this program? We don't consider that bug important enough (despite the years of lots of bug reports). You're not paying for my time. Hence why I started off saying "in the past." Naturally I stopped. Yes, you do need bug reports from users who aren't programmers. They've found bugs that you didn't. You can't expect everyone to learn how your program works internally, and understand your programming quirks. My programming days are ancient, pen and paper, writing mnemonics, looking up the op-codes, writing them down (*I* was the compiler), hand typing them into a programmer. And some basic (e.g. wrote a relational database in a language that really doesn't have what you need for that) and ARexx (wrote what was virtually a CRON daemon on a system that doesn't have one). That was back in the days of if you wanted to do anything, you wrote your own programs. But romping into a complex and ever evolving OS, and getting to grips with someone else's program, is diving into the deep end. And, yes, I understand that programmers time isn't valueless. But that isn't why you participate in open-source software. You got a free ride on this free OS, with a free compiler, and a free hundred other things that you're using. And then you do something that adds to that free system, in some way. Ordinary users contribute in other ways. As mentioned, they find bugs. But they also stop using Windows or Mac, and don't forget that the way one OS grows is by a reduction of the others. They advocate Linux to other users who've never heard of it, or have completely the wrong idea about what it is. They help people use the software, answer questions, write guides. Going back much further in the past, I participated in support lists for various Amiga software. In those lists, you had users who were programmers, who could directly help with fixes. You had users who understood the specs (HTML, email, whatever), that the programmer hadn't understood, who helped the programmers create the programs properly. And you had ordinary users who found other problems and they also help with fine-tuning the program. Some of that was freeware, shareware, and outright commercial.