What would most aid WINE development?

[Daniel Kegel]

Susheel Daswani wrote:
 > For my 'Antitrust & IP' course this semester I am writing a brief
 > about why I think the remedy in the Microsoft antitrust case was
 > inadequate.

Back in the day, I wrote an essay about this; it's online at
   http://kegel.com/remedy/
in particular,
   http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/major/mtc-00028571.htm

I now think my essay was naive, but hey, I was young :-)
It would be interesting to see the complaints sent to the Technical Committee
( http://www.thetc.org/ ) but I doubt they're public.
You might also want to read http://www.lessig.org/content/testimony/msft/msft.pdf
if you haven't already.

> So my question for the WINE developers is "What materials from
> Microsoft would most aid the development of WINE"?  The Windows API is
> of course public, so my guess is that isn't a huge bar to creating
> WINE.  So what are the bars?  Is it simply the scope of the project? 
> Is there information that MS could divulge that would greatly aid the
> WINE effort?  Would open sourcing part of Windows help?

As others have noted, the Windows API is not completely public
nor particularly well-defined.   This makes things harder, but
it's not really the main obstacle.

Here are a few things a judge could order Microsoft to do that would help Wine:
* order them to break up into two companies, one for operating systems and .net, one for everything else
* donate gobs of cash to Wine
* offer a perpetual, transferrable, royalty-free, GPL-compatible license for its protocols and data formats
* support ODF in Microsoft Office

That last item is kind of indirect.  It would make it much easier for
everybody to switch to OpenOffice, which would make it much easier
for everybody to switch to Linux, which is the whole point of Wine.

- Dan

-- 
Wonder why Aunt Tilly still won't use Linux?  See http://kegel.com/linux/comfort