The most likely way to get IBM to sponsor WINE development

[dschwarz at bellatlantic.net]

I've been following this discussion with some interest. I am a former
Iris/Lotus/IBM employee, and I now run the Winecentric pages
www.winecentric.com, basically a faq on how to run Lotus Notes and other
programs under WINE.

I have had unofficial conversations with Lotus product development
managers; they have reacted to customer requests for the Lotus Notes client
on Linux by doing their own testing, and they even publish an official page
outlining how to run Lotus Notes with WINE.  They don't offer customer
support (that would cost millions).

The best way to get IBM to sponsor WINE development is to persuade them to
port their flagship applications to Linux. IBM/Lotus have a long history of
using API translators to port products across platforms, including Lotus
Notes and SmartSuite.

If they were persuaded to port, say, VisualAge for Java and SmartSuite,
using Winelib, we'd gain some new applications plus (hopefully) IBM would
contribute any Winelib enhancements back.

Just my 2 cents...

Dan Schwarz
help at winecentric.com