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

[Jan Zerebecki]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 03:17:35PM -0700, Sasan Iman wrote:
> 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. 

I think the applications that would give Wine the most popularity
are the current long term top games. I don't have any need for MS
Office at all. It differs from person to person what they think
is most needed in wine. And that is fine, because fixing wine
properly for one application doesn't prevent fixing it properly
for another one and one fix often helps many applications.

If someone has the money to pay for MS Office, they certainly
have the (comparably) peanuts to pay for CrossOver. Paying CX
means paying someone to make wine better. Why wouldn't they want
to do this?

If many people are interested in getting MS Office to run on wine
(in a turn key way or even only in a follow a how-to way) surely
one of them is willing to work on it, right? With an application
that already runs on CrossOver it's even something that doesn't
need too much work as all the hard things were already done by
CX. If anyone needs help on how to work on wine, I'll be happy to
help anyone help wine (best done on IRC).

How good an application is supported by the wine community
obviously depends on how much work people put into it. You can
see that there is a difference by e.g. comparing the appdb
entries of World of Warcraft and MS Office. WoW has since some
time details on the appdb on how to make it run in wine. There
are none for MS Office and there aren't even detailed bug reports
(on those versions I looked at). Working to get an application in
wine running usually also has the benefit that sometimes people
help achieving that, who don't have any specific interest in that
application.

So I expect you to follow up on what you said and scratch your
personal wine itch. Free software is about sharing work. In the
sense that when we put our effort together we get something that
is more than what we would have when we didn't share. This can
also mean paying someone to do the work for you.



Jan