Is Wine a platform for Codeweaver to make money?! Please help me understand.

[Tom Spear]

I agree that wine should be able to run office out of the box, but I
also agree with most of the developers' goals, which is to rewrite the
windows api (that is my interpretation, and slimmed down at that).  It
is unfortunate that office doesn't work, but in order to make sure the
api is clean and we replicate windows, bugs and all, we can't have
hacks in the main source tree.  Having more people get involved is
always worth it, and ideas such as yours are not a waste of the
developers' time.  Unfortunately linux adoption has not become
widespread enough for most people simply because the driver support
for all the little gismos and gadgets is not there, and it doesnt just
work, which is what most people want, and so without the LUB
incerasing, the WUB will not increase.

Tom

On 3/29/07, Sasan Iman <iman at simantis.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you all for your replies.
>
> First of all, my conspiracy accusation was meant more as a joke than a
> real belief. Being a hardcore engineer myself, albeit not in your
> domain, I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into these
> types of projects.
>
> Second,  the explanation about running Office requiring special hacks
> makes a lot of sense so from a technical point of view, I understand the
> reason for having a side release (through Codeweaver) for running Office.
>
> But third, I must say that even though I agree with your general
> comments that Wine is not targeted to an application but is meant to be
> a core implementation, but I think having the top most used windows
> software working on Wine out of the box will do wonders for its
> popularity (I have no proof for this other than the fact that I
> personally don't run wine because I can't run Office and I have tried
> 6-7 times in the last 3 years every time hoping the new release will do
> the trick). I don't know how much effort it would take to get Office
> working on Wine but if getting it to work out-of-the-box means putting
> it on many more systems (leading to more people getting interested, more
> mileage leading to more bug reports, more people finding reason to get
> involved to fix bugs, etc.) then the extra effort may well be worth it.
> And let me say that Office alternatives on linux are not really a
> solution at this point. For example, even though OpenOffice is good for
> writing documents from scratch, documents' look and feel is different in
> OpenOffice than Word and that just forces me to find a Windows machine
> every time I need to open a Word document.
>
> I don't really know how many people like me are out there. If I am the
> only one, then I am wasting your times. But if there are many others
> like me, then I don't think any of you will argue against the benefits
> and the priority of having Office work in the stock release. Maybe a
> good way to approach this is to put up a survey or a poll on WineHQ and
> ask people if they'd use Wine if software X and Y and Z was running
> out-of-the-box? That way you'd also find out how many non-technical
> people are following Wine to solve their computing needs.
>
> Thanks again for your hard works. I've been cheering you guys on for a
> few years and will continue to do so.
>
> Sasan
>
>
>
> Brian Vincent wrote:
> > On 3/28/07, Sasan Iman <iman at simantis.com> wrote:
> >> I know that if you fiddle around with the stock release long enough you
> >> can get MS Office working on Wine as I have on a number of occasions,
> >> but shouldn't making this work for everyone be the highest priority for
> >> getting Wine to be adopted more widely?! Or is Wine more targeted to
> >> gamers which is mostly what I read about on WineHQ?
> >
> > CodeWeavers isn't Evil.  I think everyone involved in Wine would agree
> > with that.  There is absolutely no question that without their
> > involvement several core pieces of Wine probably wouldn't exist.  For
> > example, MSI, COM, MSHTML, etc.  We'd probably still have a good
> > Direct3D implementation though because Stefan is sick like that.
> >
> > As far as getting Office to work, you and everyone else are more than
> > welcome to work on that.  We even have a free graphical regression
> > testing system (cxtest) that CodeWeavers developed that could help you
> > maintain that.  Personally, I'd be ecstatic if you'd be willing to
> > work on that.
> >
> > Finally, I wouldn't exactly say Wine is targeted at gamers any more
> > than anything else.
> >
> > -Brian
>
>
>


-- 
Thanks

Tom

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