No subject

< Contracting with a Third Party to Enhance Wine to Support 
< Microsoft Office. "Within 60 days of entry of this Final Judgement, 
< Microsoft must contract with one or more outside firms to enhance the
< Open Source Windows Emulator WINE to be able to install and run
< Office 2000 under Linux. The work shall continue,with new releases
< of Wine occurring every 60 days, until completed, or until the expenses
< incurred by the outside firms reach 2 percent of the total development
< and marketing costs of Office 2000. Furthermore, as soon as practicable,
< but in no case later than 60 days prior to the date each new version of
< Office becomes commercially available for use with a Windows Operating
< System Product, Microsoft shall again contract with one or more outside
< firms to enhance the Open Source Windows Emulator WINE to be able to 
< install and run the new version of Office under Linux. The work shall
< continue, with new releases of Wine occurring every 60 days, until 
< completed, or until the expenses incurred by the outside firms
< reach 2 percent of the total development and marketing costs
< of the new version of Office. 

What is perhaps more realistic to require IMHO that Office and other
Microsoft  applications shouldn't crash or behave in a inconsistant
way just because some odd feature in some API call is not available.
Instead it should say, sorry can't do that not supported in the OS. 

This would prevent Microsoft from sabotaging Wine as well
preventing users of say Windows 95 from needlessly having to
upgrade.

Yes, I'm aware of that Microsoft of course not can check every
API call and have a fallback for each function, but groups of 
features that is potentially unneeded for basic features in Office like:

1. DirectX
2. MAPI
3. .NET
4. DAO
5. "Sound"
6. "Networking"
7. <Insert whatever favorite technology from Microsoft that you like>

shouldn't be required to do normal stuff in Office.

> 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?

That is an impossible question to answer.
 
> 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?

Yes. But I don't rember which ones right know but there are
quite a lot of undocumented API calls used by a lot of
different programs.

Perhaps somebody else on the list can be more specific.