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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?"
Look at the number of people running "tweaked" Linux kernels, instead of the "vanilla" version from Linus. The same thing applies to Wine.
People have special needs, and it is a good thing that software can be adapted for that. Now, as Wine is a compability layer, it is even more sensible than most other software to special needs in different environments. So don't expect the specialized variations to go away anytime soon.
Also, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are many variations out there. As long as the improvements all trickle back to the common source everyone will reap the benefits eventually. (Now, older versions of Wine are not LGPL, but whatever.)
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I've been using various Windows based products lately (ex. Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Windows (I believe Microsoft Office utilizes Windows to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Windows destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Windows hacked into a gaming system, hacked into productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Windows, or is the best solution a customized one?