Is Wine Destined to be a Specialist's Toolkit?

Bryan Porter asks: "I've been using various Wine based products lately (ex. WineX, CrossOver, etc.), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Wine (I believe Virtuoso 3.0 utilizes Wine to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Wine destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Wine hacked into a cross-platform gaming system, hacked into cross-platform productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Wine, or is the best solution a customized one?"

Comments

Wine performance is asymptotic

[mnmn]

The more work put into wine, the closer it gets to windows APIs. It never gets there, but the closer wine gets to the windows API, the harder it gets to improve it. Sooner or later, opensource developers get bored for not getting much out of a lot of work. So the companies move in and try to get a niche market to stay afloat.

The companies exist because theres a huge market of running windows software on unices and wine isnt exactly there. Any company can invest in marketing and sell enough copies to pay for the marketing plus their salaries. The free software developers would much rather develop interesting stuff in native Linux/BSD at full speed, and port it everywhere.