What would most aid WINE development?

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Susheel Daswani" <sdaswani at boalthall.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> 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?

One of the problems is that microsoft uses a vague term "Operating System
component" for almost everything one might expect to get free access to. This
includes Internet Explorer and its components including upgrades, Windows Media
Player and its components, MDAC, and many other things like MFC which don't exist
in older Windows versions, and which are allowed to download only for "genuine
windows" users. It effectively removes a visible border between an application,
a redistributable component, and the OS itself. Microsoft simply wants to tell
the users that everything it develops is Windows OS, and therefore is illegal
to use on any other platform. It's nonsense to require an OS license to install
an application.

For instance Office 2003 does not install MFC dlls while its components don't
work without MFC. Since Wine doesn't have MFC, and clearly MFC is not an OS
component, and developing MFC is out of the Wine scope, that's a problem.

-- 
Dmitry.