Wine, Office, and the antitrust settlement

Hetz Ben-Hamo hetz at kde.org
Mon Dec 10 10:33:49 CST 2001


On Monday 10 December 2001 18:03 pm, Dan Kegel wrote:
> I'm proposing that Wine be part of the settlement of the
> Microsoft antitrust trial.  See
>   http://www.kegel.com/remedy.html
> Comments welcome.

I read in theregister.co.uk (it's not there any more) then part of the 
settlement was that they will open the API, but ONLY to COMMERCIAL companies, 
adios open source stuff.

> I have a few questions for Wine developers, especially
> the good folks at Codeweavers and Transgaming:
>
> 1. How much would it cost to achieve full support for
> Office 2000 in Wine?

Heh, thats a good one. Popping up my Office 2K from my old MSDN subscription 
I had (MS still thinks that I'm subscribed, donno why), gives me this error: 

[snip]
fixme:ole:CoCreateInstance no classfactory created for CLSID 
{000c101c-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}, hres is 0x80070005
fixme:advapi:RegisterEventSourceW ((null),L"MsiInstaller"): stub
fixme:advapi:ReportEventW stub
fixme:advapi:DeregisterEventSource (1): stub
fixme:thread:SetThreadExecutionState (0x80000000): stub, harmless (power 
management).
fixme:advapi:SetThreadToken ((nil), 0): stub (NT impl. only)
err:win:WIN_FindWndPtr window 10021 belongs to other process
This installation package could not be opened.  Contact the application 
vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package.

So without the native windows DLL's, you cannot even install it yet. 

Also, if I'm not mistaken, Office 2K uses heavily MSIE infrastructure, and 
MSIE still cannot be even installed on wine (without windows), so I suspect 
it's a ton of work to do.

> 2. Is it true that Office uses undocumented Windows APIs?
> If so, how many?  Are they a significant part of the
> challenge of supporting Office?

Well, they did almost anything they can to complicate the word file format, 
so I assume that yes, they did use any trick in the book (and those who are 
not in the book), but again - I didn't see Windows, nor office source code, 
so I cannot say for sure. Maybe other people here can..

-- 
Hetz Ben Hamo
hetz at kde.org




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