[Wine] Arguments for Wine on windows/incremental adoption

[James Mckenzie]

Deweirdifier wrote
>
>If its true about windows 7, then Its now or never.
>
>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Operating_system_usage_share.svg
>
Yes, it is true.  There are several add-ons that also state they cannot be used under virtualized operating systems as well.  This means that they actually detect the existance of a VM and then will not install.  Several people have mentioned that here in the forums.  I think this is draconian as well, and the E.U. courts have ruled most, but not all, of the Microsoft EULA unenforcable.  Unfortunately, the U.S. Federal court system has not found reason, yet, to do the same.  Hopefully, our small numbers will keep us as experiementers and not mainstream usage of their products.  Several times, Winetricks was broken because files have moved or been made unavailable.

And it will be some time before XP's numbers become smaller.  The same is happening with Leopard (MacOSX 10.5) because Apple decided to drop Power PC processor support.  Not all Mac owners are ready or willing to switch to Intel based platforms :)

As to the legal status of the EULA, I will get it and read through it again.  There may be a 'loophole' where individual dll files maybe usable in a virtual environment (of which Wine is a virtualized version of the Windows API on top of UNIX) and thus can be used if you possess a license, other than the MSDN version.

In any case, my statements on ReactOS do stand.  The producers have stated in the past that they examined dll code while it was in operation to determine what was being done.  Sadly, that is not completely legal according to 'black box/white box' rules and could lead to legal problems in the future.

James McKenzie