Wine, Office, and the antitrust settlement

[Dan Kegel]

Thanks for the feedback!  I've updated my proposal
a bit based on your comments and those of others.

I do think this is a big opportunity for Wine;
the improvements needed to run Office will surely
make it possible to run many other programs as
well -- at least, as long as they're placed under
the same license as Wine, which my proposal
now stipulates.
- Dan
http://www.kegel.com/remedy.html 

Jeremy White wrote:
> 
> 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