[Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

[Steven Edwards]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:53 PM, James McKenzie
<jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Many companies don't trust Open Source.  They just don't have the assets
> to do a proper code sweep and to see that we do not want to swipe their
> secrets, but give them something better.  Of course, we all know the
> outcome of the Windows versus OS/2 wars:  Windows won and the best
> product went home (it is still available by the way.)

Its not even Open Source though, I mean that's another strike but the
VMware example shows, any sort of legacy solution, virtualized or
otherwise is a major show stopper. Hell, I have enough trouble with
vendors and JVM versions. Try getting support for an application
running under BEAs JVM verses Sun and the vendor balks.

Wine problem is a chicken and egg problem. Most won't support Wine and
so most won't run Wine. The vendors won't support it because most
won't run Wine. And the cycle of life repeats. That compounded with
the fact that as Linux gets better, there is no need for Wine as the
vendor will just target apps directly. Facing both of these situations
I've started to believe Wine won't ever become much more than it is.
It's going to be hit or miss even if it installs, its always going to
be playing catch up.

That's not a bad thing, a niche market is fine as everything has its
place. The wine project just needs to be a bit more flexible as far as
integration goes. I think for a long time we've tried to be too
generic, distro agnostic, etc. For Wine to get more adoption we need
to do a better on that end. Scott and others have been working a lot
to solve this problem with the associations, XDG stuff, etc. We need a
lot more work on the OS X side and that will help us tremendously due
to the size of the market.

OK I'm done ranting.

Thanks
-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo