Wine, Office, and the antitrust settlement

[Jeremy White]

Hi Dan,

I read your remedy proposal; nice work.

I obviously like your proposal (hire CodeWeavers
to port Office, great idea! <grin>).  I'm skeptical
that this proposal will be accepted, and I also feel
a bit uncomfortable advocating it as it clearly
benefits organizations like mine, and doesn't so clearly
benefit the Wine community.

However, to answer your question, if you value time
(i.e. assume people get paid market wages, as opposed
to donate their time), a reasonable off the cuff
guess for MS Office support (to make it *really*
work) is probably on the order of $1-2M or so.

Please note, that's largely a guess, and includes a
large fudge factor because it's unclear how much
work Office XP is going to require (AFAIK, no
one has brought it up in Wine yet).

We could probably reduce the cost and
effort if we had engineers at MS actively helping
us (so we weren't always fighting up hill).

As far as undocumented APIs in Office, I know
of only one used in Office 2000 (of course, the problem
with undocumented APIs is that there may be many
more we're ignorant of).

Finally, I think my largest concern with Wine is in
securing protection from Microsoft patents.  

I've lost some large sales because
Mainsoft sales people use patent FUD successfully
on my potential customers.

Further, it is unclear whether or not
open source projects such as Samba, Mono, and Wine are
going to be permitted to play in the post .NET world.
My greatest fear is that MS will be able to take
some legal action that will prevent Wine from
supporting any .net enabled application.

IANAL, so I have not idea as to the full extent of
the threat from MS or what a potential remedy
would look like, but IMHO, that's a more
significant issue than others we've faced.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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 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?
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan Kegel
> dank at kegel.com