Is Wine a platform for Codeweaver to make money?! Please help me understand.

Sasan Iman iman at simantis.com
Thu Mar 29 17:17:35 CDT 2007


Thank you all for your replies.

First of all, my conspiracy accusation was meant more as a joke than a 
real belief. Being a hardcore engineer myself, albeit not in your 
domain, I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into these 
types of projects.

Second,  the explanation about running Office requiring special hacks 
makes a lot of sense so from a technical point of view, I understand the 
reason for having a side release (through Codeweaver) for running Office.

But third, I must say that even though I agree with your general 
comments that Wine is not targeted to an application but is meant to be 
a core implementation, but I think having the top most used windows 
software working on Wine out of the box will do wonders for its 
popularity (I have no proof for this other than the fact that I 
personally don't run wine because I can't run Office and I have tried 
6-7 times in the last 3 years every time hoping the new release will do 
the trick). I don't know how much effort it would take to get Office 
working on Wine but if getting it to work out-of-the-box means putting 
it on many more systems (leading to more people getting interested, more 
mileage leading to more bug reports, more people finding reason to get 
involved to fix bugs, etc.) then the extra effort may well be worth it. 
And let me say that Office alternatives on linux are not really a 
solution at this point. For example, even though OpenOffice is good for 
writing documents from scratch, documents' look and feel is different in 
OpenOffice than Word and that just forces me to find a Windows machine 
every time I need to open a Word document.

I don't really know how many people like me are out there. If I am the 
only one, then I am wasting your times. But if there are many others 
like me, then I don't think any of you will argue against the benefits 
and the priority of having Office work in the stock release. Maybe a 
good way to approach this is to put up a survey or a poll on WineHQ and 
ask people if they'd use Wine if software X and Y and Z was running 
out-of-the-box? That way you'd also find out how many non-technical 
people are following Wine to solve their computing needs.

Thanks again for your hard works. I've been cheering you guys on for a 
few years and will continue to do so.

Sasan



Brian Vincent wrote:
> On 3/28/07, Sasan Iman <iman at simantis.com> wrote:
>> I know that if you fiddle around with the stock release long enough you
>> can get MS Office working on Wine as I have on a number of occasions,
>> but shouldn't making this work for everyone be the highest priority for
>> getting Wine to be adopted more widely?! Or is Wine more targeted to
>> gamers which is mostly what I read about on WineHQ?
>
> CodeWeavers isn't Evil.  I think everyone involved in Wine would agree
> with that.  There is absolutely no question that without their
> involvement several core pieces of Wine probably wouldn't exist.  For
> example, MSI, COM, MSHTML, etc.  We'd probably still have a good
> Direct3D implementation though because Stefan is sick like that.
>
> As far as getting Office to work, you and everyone else are more than
> welcome to work on that.  We even have a free graphical regression
> testing system (cxtest) that CodeWeavers developed that could help you
> maintain that.  Personally, I'd be ecstatic if you'd be willing to
> work on that.
>
> Finally, I wouldn't exactly say Wine is targeted at gamers any more
> than anything else.
>
> -Brian



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