IBM Acknowledges Wine! Offers bounty to port it to PPC64!

[Jeremy White]

Tom Wickline wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:14:39 -0800, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> 
>>This marks a change in IBMs policy towards Wine, or perhaps signals a
>>management oversight.  While normally it seems that they have an active
>>policy of censoring any references to Wine and completely denying its
>>existence, here they are offering prizes for porting it to PPC.
> 
> 
> I don't agree with this statement and here is why:
> 
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-wine/index.html
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-toppage/index.html
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sc10.html
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-emulat.html

Tom,

That first is an article that went up, and then was taken down.  The authors
were mystified as to why it was ordered removed.

It later 'reappeared', but as you can see, it's broken in appeareance,
which suggests that it went back up by accident, rather than
by intention.

Further, if you look at their 'desktop migration' redbook, 268 pages
of advice on how to migrate from Windows to Linux, you'll see that
it mentions Wine exactly once, in passing, and somewhat derogatorily.
It then goes on to spend 3 paragraphs on Citrix.  Further, if you
probe the author on this, he'll respond cryptically that he's
happy to take input on the subject, but he has certain restrictions
on changes he can make to the Red Book.  And since many of the
comments on Slashdot when this went up were along the lines of
"Huh?  Why don't they mention Wine", I don't think I just have a biased
view of the Red Book.

So I don't think Scott's statement is untrue.

Now, with that said, I know of many, many good folks at IBM that
are big supporters of Wine, and with any organization like IBM
it's hard to make a blanket statement.

Cheers,

Jeremy