5 ms·

CodeWeavers Now Controlled by an Employee Ownership Trust

166 points by computerliker 3y ago

leetrout 3y ago
Link to original blog post on the other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002930
shinjitsu 3y ago
I was a subscriber 10-15 years ago, but I used steam/proton now, I wonder how large the market for something like codeweavers is in 2023?
- mattl 3y ago
  Codeweavers is paid by Valve to work on Proton
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I suspect that even means that, courtesy of Proton, CodeWeavers now is used by and indirectly paid for by more people than ever:)
    - mattl 3y ago
      I’m sure. I’ve been a paid user of Crossover for a while but I mainly use it on my Steam Deck now
      - saghm 3y ago
        I'm also a previous Crossover customer who now uses proton (via lutris). I have to wonder if something like Crossover necessarily needs to exist in the long term; I suspect that part of the rationale for it was that they needed some sort of UI to present/sell the real work they did to make stuff run smoothly without needing users to do a bunch of manual Wine configuration. Obviously there are business caveats to tying yourself so closely to only one paying customer, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a technical need for the work they do to be tied to an in-house UI.
        mattl 3y ago
        I’m still paying for it and will keep doing so. I hope it never goes away.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  The majority of the work on Proton is actually being doing by Codeweavers. IIRC they even control the main github repo
abeppu 3y ago
> As he's been the largest shareholder at the company, with his departure he decided to transition the firm to being an employee ownership trust. The trust will see that CodeWeavers continues to operate for the benefit of the community and staff. I'm not familiar with the "employee ownership trust" concept, so I was curious as to how it differed from a worker co-op. On reading a layperson description, is it perhaps misnamed? It seems like people consider it to be a form of employee ownership, but (a) employees do not buy in (b) employees are not bought out when they leave (c) employees do not necessarily have any kind of voting rights, and the trust could be managed by trustees who are not elected by (or from among) employees. It sounds like EOTs _can_ share profits or pay dividends out to employees, but don't need to. So in what sense is it employee "ownership"? It seems like it's just a perpetual trust whose goal includes employee well-being. An org on employee ownership says [1]: > There is no legal definition of what separates an EOT from similar trusts, but to be an EOT, the purpose of the trust should include the well-being of the company’s employees. So it's a trust which exists _for_ the employees, but does that mean the _own_ it? A few months ago I listened to this podcast [3] about a perpetual trust set up to benefit stray cats. Despite it being created _for_ stray cats, of course no one claims that the trust is _owned_ by stray cats. [1] https://www.nceo.org/article/introduction-employee-ownership-trusts https://www.nceo.org/article/introduction-employee-ownership... [2] https://www.esoppartners.com/blog/employee-ownership-models https://www.esoppartners.com/blog/employee-ownership-models [3] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158865140/stray-cats-dixfield-maine-trust-inheritance-will https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158865140/stray-cats-dixfiel...
- zrail 3y ago
  Here's my interpretation of how this might work (reading between the lines and based on how ESOPs typically work): 1. The founder wanted out but didn't want to sell to a PE firm, and they wanted to give control to the employees. 2. The founder set up a trust that will gradually buy them out over the course of 7 years. The financial arrangement is probably something like: the trust got a long term loan for the initial tranche of purchases which it will pay back via dividends attached to those shares. It will also use those dividends to pay for future tranches of shares. 3. Employees don't have any ownership rights at all, the trust is the sole shareholder. Employees do have control of the trust, to an extent, because at least some members of the trustee board will be elected from the staff. The trust is probably written such that the trustees can elect to distribute to the staff some or all of the dividends remaining after founder share purchases and debt service. To answer the ownership question, trusts don't really have owners. Trust materialize into existence when a grantor (the founder) funds them for the benefit of beneficiaries (in this case the staff) and are controlled by trustees (in this case, at least some part of whom are staff).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nh2 3y ago
Props to them and the Wine project for their great achievement: Removing the last consumer monopoly Windows had (games). They are the reason I didn't have to boot away from Linux for 10 years.

166 points by computerliker 3y ago

Link to original blog post on the other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002930

shinjitsu 3y ago

I was a subscriber 10-15 years ago, but I used steam/proton now, I wonder how large the market for something like codeweavers is in 2023?

mattl 3y ago
Codeweavers is paid by Valve to work on Proton
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I suspect that even means that, courtesy of Proton, CodeWeavers now is used by and indirectly paid for by more people than ever:)
  - mattl 3y ago
    I’m sure. I’ve been a paid user of Crossover for a while but I mainly use it on my Steam Deck now
    - saghm 3y ago
      I'm also a previous Crossover customer who now uses proton (via lutris). I have to wonder if something like Crossover necessarily needs to exist in the long term; I suspect that part of the rationale for it was that they needed some sort of UI to present/sell the real work they did to make stuff run smoothly without needing users to do a bunch of manual Wine configuration. Obviously there are business caveats to tying yourself so closely to only one paying customer, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a technical need for the work they do to be tied to an in-house UI.
      - mattl 3y ago
        I’m still paying for it and will keep doing so. I hope it never goes away.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
Rebelgecko 3y ago
The majority of the work on Proton is actually being doing by Codeweavers. IIRC they even control the main github repo

abeppu 3y ago

> As he's been the largest shareholder at the company, with his departure he decided to transition the firm to being an employee ownership trust. The trust will see that CodeWeavers continues to operate for the benefit of the community and staff. I'm not familiar with the "employee ownership trust" concept, so I was curious as to how it differed from a worker co-op. On reading a layperson description, is it perhaps misnamed? It seems like people consider it to be a form of employee ownership, but (a) employees do not buy in (b) employees are not bought out when they leave (c) employees do not necessarily have any kind of voting rights, and the trust could be managed by trustees who are not elected by (or from among) employees. It sounds like EOTs _can_ share profits or pay dividends out to employees, but don't need to. So in what sense is it employee "ownership"? It seems like it's just a perpetual trust whose goal includes employee well-being. An org on employee ownership says [1]: > There is no legal definition of what separates an EOT from similar trusts, but to be an EOT, the purpose of the trust should include the well-being of the company’s employees. So it's a trust which exists _for_ the employees, but does that mean the _own_ it? A few months ago I listened to this podcast [3] about a perpetual trust set up to benefit stray cats. Despite it being created _for_ stray cats, of course no one claims that the trust is _owned_ by stray cats. [1] https://www.nceo.org/article/introduction-employee-ownership-trusts https://www.nceo.org/article/introduction-employee-ownership... [2] https://www.esoppartners.com/blog/employee-ownership-models https://www.esoppartners.com/blog/employee-ownership-models [3] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158865140/stray-cats-dixfield-maine-trust-inheritance-will https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158865140/stray-cats-dixfiel...

zrail 3y ago
Here's my interpretation of how this might work (reading between the lines and based on how ESOPs typically work): 1. The founder wanted out but didn't want to sell to a PE firm, and they wanted to give control to the employees. 2. The founder set up a trust that will gradually buy them out over the course of 7 years. The financial arrangement is probably something like: the trust got a long term loan for the initial tranche of purchases which it will pay back via dividends attached to those shares. It will also use those dividends to pay for future tranches of shares. 3. Employees don't have any ownership rights at all, the trust is the sole shareholder. Employees do have control of the trust, to an extent, because at least some members of the trustee board will be elected from the staff. The trust is probably written such that the trustees can elect to distribute to the staff some or all of the dividends remaining after founder share purchases and debt service. To answer the ownership question, trusts don't really have owners. Trust materialize into existence when a grantor (the founder) funds them for the benefit of beneficiaries (in this case the staff) and are controlled by trustees (in this case, at least some part of whom are staff).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nh2 3y ago

Props to them and the Wine project for their great achievement: Removing the last consumer monopoly Windows had (games). They are the reason I didn't have to boot away from Linux for 10 years.