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Wine Now Has Big-Time Lawyers On Its Side
Roblimo writes "For years there's been fear that the Wine Project would get sued by Microsoft at some point, and this fear has kept IBM and other major free software-using companies from participating openly in it. Now the Software Freedom Law Center, headed by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, is offering free legal services to Wine (and other FOSS projects) to allay corporate fears and head off potential lawsuits."
"well, we might not get all of their business, but we'll take what we can get." From a business standpoint, that would seem to make more sense.
What makes sense about supporting a project whose focus will make one of your core (profitable) products unnecessary?
Making Windows applications run on Linux (or whatever) won't make Linux users run out and buy Office. No, rather it will make Windows customers migrate to Linux (because they can still keep their old software).
First, this will mean that more programs will get support. (Applications like AutoCAD, which doesn't quite work yet.)
Second, since I started using the Mac, I've become interested in the Darwine project, which aims to make Windows programs run on the Mac without running Windows in an emulator; this project aims to combine Qemu and Wine to run the Wine code natively on the Mac iron while emulating only the application code. Big support behind Wine will likely mean a better Windows-like operating layer not only on x86 systems running, say, Linux, but also on non-x86 systems that are candidates for running the occasional Windows program.
Third, IBM has OS/2 code, which contains some of the same code as Windows itself. I'm not saying that IBM could submit that code directly into Wine, but IBM could have a clean-room implementation of some of the most important functions, using a plain-English specification written by programmers with access to the code. Not to mention that it means a lot of Wine bugs will get fixed. This is good news!