[Wine] Windows Genuine Advantage

[Francesco Pietra]

I am not answering the technical aspects of wine, which I am unable to do. I 
am rather at a philosophical issue, that is what do you expect from wine. A 
scientist - like I am professionally - sees at wine as a temporary solution 
to the lack of a few programs on free unix-type environments he was used at, 
or which are absolutely necessary for presentation to the editor of for 
lecturing.

A case in point is xdrawchem. The project is to have a mirror of Windows 
chemdraw. Unfortunately, xdrawchem is still far from becoming the equivalent 
of openoffice in unix as to the language of chemistry. Imagine unix without 
openoffice: how to correspond with coworkers and editors? So that one 
attempts to run (legally) something that allows to exchange files with 
chemdraw and editors. The final goal, however, is to have xdrawchem working.

There is not much else needed today for an organic 
chemist/biochemist/natural_product_chemist/any_scientist_dealing_with_molecules 
to work fully on unix.

At that point one can easily forget about wine in science because the most 
serious programs (for computation up to quantum mechaniscs) are best 
available on unix, and they are free and under further development. Here, 
Windows has nothing to say; its computer language is too naive (or too 
intricate) to deal with our tasks of coping with mainframe or simply working 
on a partition far away.

This is not to underevaluate the wine project. It is a great project, it has a 
great future (I hope) and science does not cover all aspects of the world, 
there are many aspects where wine will continue to be of high interest and 
personally I thank wine for the time being for allowing me to work fully 
(actually nearly fully, as I have not yet solved the problem of presentation 
of chemical structures) on debian.

Cheers
francesco pietra


On Tuesday 02 May 2006 09:07, justin at rtechguys.com wrote:
> If this is off subject or has already been addressed, sorry.  "Windows
> Genuine Advantage" looks like a move to make wine worthless. What I
> mean is that M$ development API pushes windows developers' applications
> to require you install IE 6.0 (soon 7.0) or later, making IE a key part
> of wine. If IE requires Genuine MicroSoft (Windows Genuine Advantage)
> to install, then most if not all applications will not work, making
> WINE Worthless.
>
> Thanks and hope this is helpfull.
>
> Justin
>
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