Shuttleworth on Wine

[Scott Ritchie]

Ben Klein wrote:
> 2009/5/8 Nicklas Börjesson <Nicklas.Borjesson at ws.se>:
>> And the *rest* of the world DO revolve around a few applications.
>> That is why they think so.
> 
> No, the rest of the world does not revolve around a few applications,
> it's just that the #1 complaint against free operating systems has
> been traditionally "it won't run Photoshop". In my experience, most
> people who argue this don't even care about it, and in fact some
> people miss the point entirely and dismiss Wine as "not a solution",
> because they expect it to run natively, fluidly, with complete desktop
> integration etc.
> 

The great thing about this is these are all solvable problems, even in 
the near term.  Photoshop almost works.  Desktop integration is almost 
there.  I'm doing what I can to make Wine a very impressive piece of 
software to the point where its integration into the desktop seems 
completely natural.

>>> Though, I must say, the majority of people I see/hear using Photoshop
>>> *are* using it as a toy/hobby, not for 'real' work, i.e., a full time
>>> job.
>> I have the same impression. And most haven't paid for it either.
>> Anyway, that really isn't important.
> 
> Except that WineHQ does not officially support pirated software (it
> may run, but you'll get no official help getting it to run or work
> properly).
> 

Internet Explorer: Free as in beer.  Wine: Free as in speech. 
Photoshop: Free as in stolen.

>> The important thing is that they want it, no why.
> 
> As it stands, yes, the fact that they want it is more important than
> why. It's also unimportant to Wine's goals (which is for *all*
> applications to run, not just Photoshop), and should not be considered
> a factor in determining when the next release is ready.
> 
> 

We had "no application regressions" as a release goal for 1.0, more or 
less - in practice that meant we were targeting every application users 
wanted to test it on.  But there were also 4 specific apps targeted too 
- IIRC stuff like word viewer.  In principle there's no reason an 
application like Photoshop couldn't be considered release critical in 
much the same fashion these were.

For practical reasons, however, we probably don't want to target 
particular applications just because they're popular - a better strategy 
would be to target particular users who only need one application that 
is almost working.  At least, that's what the model I wrote told me: 
http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/48

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie