On GCA slowness in Wine:
I don't have time to search the forums now, but I recall several posts about how to make GCA much faster in Wine, not as fast as native, but much faster than the default Wine setup. I think it had to do with the OS emulation setting or something. Searching the other GCA+Linux threads might help you out.
On SJG open-sourcing GCA:- SJG doesn't own GCA, Armin does, they just sell it. They couldn't OSS it if they wanted to.
- Armin makes a trickle, AFAIK, of money off of the sale of GCA. Moving to a model where anyone could distribute copies of GCA for free could very well shoot that revenue in the head, so to speak. Only Armin could say if that would really affect him, but even a tiny trickle of revenue is money in the bank, and he may not want to risk that income.
- I'm not sure GCA would benefit from open-sourcing. It's written in Visual Basic 6 (yes, VB6, not even VB.NET, GCA wasn't written yesterday) and the codebase comes with some baggage. Any project to open-source and clean up the codebase would probably be far better served by just starting from scratch and emulating the GCA functionality while not having to deal with decades of encumbered VB6 code. I know Armin has given that some thought to migrating the codebase to VB.NET, and it could very well make sense for him to do so, but once you start adding extra developers who aren't familiar with the code, starting from scratch would likely become far more attractive. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.
- Anyone who would like to contribute source to an open-source GCA-compatible character program can do so right now by starting their own project. It won't actually be GCA, but does that matter. I also think you're overestimating the number of developers who'd contribute to such a project, because if they exist you'd think that there would already be OSS GCA-like projects, and there aren't -- no, GCS doesn't count.
I'm not trying to say that GCA would absolutely not benefit from going OSS, it might. I just think that most people who invariably chime in, from time to time, with "GCA should be OSS" or "you should rewrite GCA in
{insert favored language}" are not really thinking about the ramifications of what they're saying. It's not fair to people like Eric, Bruno, and numerous others who've spent real manhours working to support GCA, because warts and all it's the best tool we've got, and it's certainly not fair to Armin who spends time working to improve GCA, for free, and then gives those improvements away, again, for free.
I apologize if that came off overly rant'ish and/or harsh, that wasn't my intention as I started, but I think it got away from me. I just tire of the spiral of GCA bashing that seems to flow without thought through here sometimes. Again, my apologies if I've come across poorly.