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OSNews Interviews WINE's Alexandre Julliard
Eugenia writes "OSNews talks with Alexandre Julliard, the WINE project leader and also CodeWeaver's coder, regarding the future of WINE, the obstacles of the development, the WINE commercialization and lots more. An interesting read overall."
As long as they are using blackbox coding, what they are doing is entirely legal. They are not releasing any MS code to the public, nor are they using any MS code to develop what they do.
In fact, Microsoft was founded on a very simmilar situation. MS DOS competing with IBM DOS. (After they stopped playing nice of course)
MS would have crushed them long ago if they had any ammo in this situation
I agree that there's no legal problem for Wine, but your comparison to PC/MS-DOS is incorrect. PC-DOS was a licensed version of MS-DOS based on the actual code written by Microsoft. It was not an attempt to clone.
He mentions the Wine database at http://appdb.codeweavers.com Please, everyone... If you play with wine and get something working or find any littler qwirks that might help others..
Contribute to the database!
I run X on Cygwin on a daily basis
at work, it's on a Pentium 233MMX 128MB ram
(old dog)
it's slow but not slower than explorer 5.5
or office 97 that we use as production environment.
I find it _VERY_ usable,
get me a descent shell, vim, ssh, etc..
and an X server that cost 0$, + no licence problem.
(comparing to eXceed or GoGlobal)
YMMV
(but on a pentiumIII 700MHZ it must fly)
Quick question, have you ever actually run X on cygwin? I have, and its about as slow as a tortise
Yes, I have, and you're right, it's pretty slow. I don't use it on a day to day basis, but then again there aren't any X apps that I feel I need right now; between Cygwin and natively ported apps, I've got my day to day uses covered. However, current efforts in the Cygwin/XFree project right now include making it use native GDI calls, which I presume will speed it up a lot. They're also apparently having some success getting network audio to work with esound and getting copy and paste to work with windows programs, helping them get ever closer to feature complete. As the KDE 2 project comes along (note that KDE 1.1 already works, although I haven't tried it), I'll be really hyped about trying KOffice on windows! Here's a question for everybody, though: will I be able to run KDevelop on Windows with Cygwin/XFree/KDE (/me drools) or Logic Audio on Linux with WINE first?? Actually, once Emagic releases Audio for native OS X, then it'll probably be time for me to drop Windows once and for all... (I dunno, tho, BSOD is kindof like a brother to me now...)
Actually, you are only partially correct. Microsoft didn't write DOS originally. They bought it from Seattle Computer. Back then, it was called QDOS (the Quick and Dirty Operating System), and was a bad knock-off of CPM. Microsoft bought the OS, polished it up a little, renamed it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM as one of the three OS's that were available for the IBM PC. It was much worse than the other OS's, but was also much cheaper, so it caught on. The rest is history.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Winemaker does a lot of the work - and is free.
The fact that Winelib is capable of as much as it is now is almost all due to our work - and is free.
We can help you get MFC working quickly and easily, and, okay, that parts not free (we have to eat somehow), but it's not that expensive. We've done it a lot, and we can genuinely save you time and hassle. It's like hiring a plumber instead of learning how to sweat pipes yourself.
Why do so few people ask us for help?
Is it because it's mostly the developers trying this, who have no budget? Or am I missing something else?
Thanks for listening,
Jeremy White, CodeWeavers