Create new mailing list wine-isv?

[David Gümbel]

On Freitag 16 Dezember 2005 10:49, Peter Beutner wrote:
> Robert Shearman schrieb:
> > Peter Beutner wrote:

> >> Maybe it's just me but when reading all this I got the feeling that
> >> writing windows applications(which work with wine) is just *the* way
> >> to go.
> >
> > It is the cheapest way for companies and it gives good results for the
> > users. What's wrong with that?
>
> See above. Wine does a lot of "tricks" to emulate windows behaviour. And
> the more you use some complex window api the more is the chance that wine
> just can't implement it the way it works in windows but has to use all
> sorts of workarounds to get it to work under linux. Sure all that
> probably won't interest any manager in a company and probably won't stand
> against the "money" argument. But as a developer I would always vote for
> doing a little bit of extra thinking by going the platform independent
> way.

That's perfectly valid from a technical point of view. However, I do think 
you're grossly overestimating both financial and HR capabilities of most 
ISVs on the market. Moreover, there's the risk factor: Why should an ISV 
start changing their code base to be more cross-platform while having a 
pretty high risk that in the forseeable future, revenue generated by this 
move might be very close or equal to zero? 

As a technician, I absolutely see your points and find most of them 
perfectly valid. As a businessman, however, I think Wine is in many cases a 
very attractive - and in some cases, the only viable - approach for 
cross-platform efforts an ISV might make in a short to mid-term timeframe. 
Which approach they take depends on many factors, but helping them in case 
they decided to go the Wine way is definetly good for both them and the 
Wine project. 


David