What would most aid WINE development?

David Lee Lambert lamber45 at cse.msu.edu
Sat Nov 19 18:46:24 CST 2005


Susheel Daswani wrote:

>My belief (which opposes the 'fact' stated above) is that if there was
>virtually complete documentation of what exists, and full disclosure
>of additions and modifications, a cloning could be achieved.  Of
>course it would take a huge capital and time investment, but the
>payoff would likely be worth it.
>  
>
The finding you cite was probably true 10 years ago,  but it may be less 
relevant today.  There are many,  many applications that were and still 
are sold to be used with the Win32 API,  but there are other 
applications that are available commercially for Linux x86,  and some 
also for Solaris x86 and FreeBSD.  Furthermore,  more applications are 
written to run on platform-independent runtime environments,  such as 
Java, JavaScript and .NET.  Besides,  a pure Linux platform is 
sufficient for many,  many tasks.

On the other hand,  some application developers like working against a 
complex, uniform, binary, proprietary OS that changes regularly but not 
too often,  and don't care if it's a monopoly (since they don't feel 
like they are the ones paying for it.)  Game vendors use all sorts of 
tricks to achieve "copy protection",  as do digital music services.  
(Cf. the recent Sony incident.)  Windows application developers also 
have a habit of trying to get the user to escalate their privileges more 
than is strictly necessary;  for instance,  MusicMatch Jukebox (which 
came free on my brother's WinXP laptop) won't run properly in a "Limited 
User" account.  For comparison,  I just installed the Linux version of 
matlab as a normal user (in my home directory,  without becoming root),  
and it runs just fine. 

As a more general statement,  the fact that old programs become unusable 
or unstable after an OS upgrade means that the useful lifetime of a 
piece of computer software is no longer anything near its copyright 
term,  but instead only about 2 or 3 years.  Even if a third-party 
organization verified that Wine 1.0.0 on such-and-such a vendor's 
version of Linux (kernel 2.6.1001, glibc7, ...) implemented 100% of the 
Win32 Unicode API calls correctly when set to the en_US.utf8 locale,  a 
lot of application vendors (including Microsoft) would probably still 
not want to support it,  because that version of Linux could be stored 
on a CD and run on a different computer 20 years from now with the same 
application.

Of course,  the biggest potential threat to Microsoft dominance is 
probably OpenOffice, Firefox and other open-source 
standard-document-processing applications.  (I said "is" because they 
are only a threat together;  no one component is a competitor by itself.)

Just some ideas...

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