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Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced
An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set):
many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
It isn't that slow when the target keeps moving. 17 years ago, we weren't even using NT, some of us were still using DOS as being "good enough" and the rest of us were using Windows 3.x, now those goals have changed and WINE has to run 32 and 64 bit software written for Vista and Windows 7. 15 years would be a long time for a "dead" platform like the Atari 2600 or the SNES. But Windows is changing and what was "good enough" one year now needs major work to keep up with the programs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's a chicken and egg scenario.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm actually quite surprised with the more recent movement of Wine though. I remember assuming nothing was going to work. Now I can assume that it might work, which is a serious improvement, IMHO. Previously I never attempted to run something unless I looked it up in the App DB and now I just run the apps and see what happens.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Yeah, Linux is a major force in the industry but good luck getting Linux ports of obscure software. For example, a business I worked with about three years ago would have been a perfect target for mass Linux adoption except for the fact that nearly all their computers needed an obscure, proprietary program that the developers had been long gone but it was needed to interact with some legacy hardware for controlling their aging magnetic entry system. Had WINE supported that program we would have ~30 computers now running Linux and the business saving money, but because WINE didn't run that program well enough, they decided to stick with Windows.
Linux has a good office suite, great hardware support, decent usability, very easy installation, but lacks a lot of specialty software that is a make-or-break program for many businesses.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Native software is fine, but a compatibility layer won't hurt. In fact, WINE is great for running legacy, closed-source software whose development is long dead with no native build going to be made.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
* frowns at emulator tag *
Which is funny because one of the traditional perceived strengths of Windows is its backwards compatibility.
It's even funnier if you consider the option of running WINE on Windows: http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Sadly, while isn't a fart in the wind like it was 17 years ago, Linux most definitely is not a major force in the desktop computing world. MOST of what people use Wine for is just that: desktop computing. Market share is a teensy blip for that type of Linux computing ... and the places where it IS much bigger tend to spend virtually nothing on commercial software.
All that forcing people to write natively to Linux instead of using Wine will do is starve those people of apps and slowly push them to Windows.
I'm in that boat. I spent nearly a decade doing technical marketing and sales engineer work for Linux products including desktop environments. Nowadays? I do that work for networking gadgets instead and have zero Linux systems active. I may have another one soon, but it will be in the form of a phone.
I'd LOVE it if Linux had made inroads, and I did my share on helping with that, but it didn't. And at some point you -do- need to find a system that will work in your corporate and social environments.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
About five years ago my employer introduced a web app for time sheets which would only work in IE. The new version works fine in generic web browsers and our thinking on this is that enough users wanted it on the mac that they were forced to fix their application.
A lot of development is now happening for iPhone and Android platforms which are sort of BSD and Linux respectively so I think Microsoft is losing slowly, but there is no one winner, which is probably good too.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I remember 16 years ago on the Wine mailing list saying that spending time supporting Win16 was a total waste of time, and they need to concentrate on Win32 as by the time they supported either in a meaningfull wa, nobody would care about Win16 anymore.
Of course I was shouted down and flamed for my entirely accurate predicition. So of course huge amounts of time where wasted in the early days concentrating doing a really good Win16 emulation, that nobody could care less about for a decade now.
WTF? Linux extinguishing something? Beating Redmond at it's own game? What game might that be? The last one is the best of all: the comment isn't talking about new Windows builds, it's talking about Linux builds that aren't gonna happen. It ALREADY works on Windows. *head explodes from ridiculous comment*
And OS/2's support for Windows 3.1 is said to have doomed it.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Does it run Linux?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Sometimes it sucks to be right.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Linux already extinguished mainstream BSD. It did as much to kill SCO as the lawsuit. It killed HURD. Face it: Linux got critical mass first, and wiped out a lot of the open-source competition. By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
Which is not, in fact, a bad thing. If anything, we need to unify Linux even more, so it can start killing some commercial systems. I'd love to see it wipe out the commercial Unices. Hell, I wouldn't cry over it killing OS X. And I've already planned the party for when it kills Windows.
Do we actually need Wine anymore?
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Good point - After all, SGI shelved IRIX and went Linux.
... a tad late. :( ); these days thanks to SUN Microsystems (anyone remembers??) I fire up my Virtualbox, and chances are, the application works.
While I was fiddling with some Windows applications over the last 10 years, to make them work in wine (not too high a success rate,
Has one made some comparison of speed, resource usage, of major applications between running in wine and running in Virtualbox? Google has a few hits, though of old age.
You can't (legally) run a Windows VM without paying Microsoft for the OS.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Yes, because it was too good.
WINE applications are definitely second-class citizens on linux. Sure, it works, but it doesn't remove the incentive for a native-application.
(Look at Mac - where Classic worked for MacOS 9 under 10, but everyone knew it was definitely second-best; or now how Carbon was second-best compared to Cocca.)
But with OS/2, developers could release a windows version and say that's it, done.
Believe it or not, WINE isn't meant for people who are using Windows... It's great that Windows suits your purposes, I'm happy that you are happy but otherwise don't give a damn. However, it is naive (and terribly offtopic) to suggest that nobody needs to run Windows applications on non-Windows platforms anymore.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Even today, Windows 7 can run 16-bit code (scarily, 16-bit code can bypass security checks). You can turn off 16-bit support, if you research it.
The 64bit version of Vista and 7 cannot run 16bit code, actually. (Can't run the installer for Command & Conquer, for example) Wine now supports that part of the Windows legacy better than Windows itself.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Why are you assuming he didn't pay for his VM?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
My god, Wine has no use whatsoever
Dude, Chibi Ace is almost as cute as Chibi Luffy. c|:0D
After all, I am strangely colored.
He's not. He's saying it's an extra cost to consider.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
And IRIX and SVR4.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The way things are going, Solaris will be dead soon too (especially if Oracle keeps doing what its been doing)
If it runs all the legacy stuff, why do you think it won't run the million viruses?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I care about Win16. The one thing I use Wine for is to run a 16-bit Windows application.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I've already sent an e-mail asking for my mistake to be reversed.
Just post a comment in the discussion (under your normal UID) and your mis-mod will be nuked. Unless of course your really, really need to mod that comment, but honestly it ain't that important!
One of the easiest ways to manage Wine versions and installing games: http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Wine was testes for virus compability not so long ago. Turns out they use obscure APIs that Wine doesn't support yet, so most of them don't run. Of course, as Wine gets better, more will.
I would just disable the filetype association of .exe files with Wine, and run the necessary apps with a menu entry like "wine app.exe", so any virus those employees downloaded would simply sit there.
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Wine isn't only a way to run Win32 binaries under Linux/Mac/etc, it's also useful if companies want to port their software over without a large budget: they can link their existing code to WineLib implementation of the WINAPI. They can even have a mix of architectures: Win32 for the core using WineLib, and then a small module with Linux specific calls for better integration with the system.
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By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
But under the hood, Palm WebOS is Linux. Mhhhm, perhaps it's just my deranged mind, but I can't help but wonder whether that would legally classify as suicide, fratricide or maybe even cannibalism...
Why run uTorrent in Wine when there's plenty of perfectly good native torrent apps?
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15 years to get to 1.0 means a speed of a 0.0666 increase in the version number per year. This extrapolates to 3 more years to get to 1.2. So it's not surprising to see a RC only two years later.
(this post just nominated for the "worst use of extrapolation 2010" award)
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
M$ is doing that to try to force the few people who had useful 16 bit software to throw it away so they'd finally spend money on newer stuff. There is no reason why they couldn't do something like Dosbox to keep 16 bit apps running on Win7 64. Dosbox already ran dos-era apps better in 32 bits windows than the native cmd.exe did.
It is probably cheaper to buy an OEM copy of XP than pay someone to try and get it working in Wine.
Why run uTorrent in Wine when there's plenty of perfectly good native torrent apps?
Because there is no native app so light and yet with a simple GUI and friendly use :p :D
The only uTorrent replacement I can suggest is kTorrent, that is not so light, but it's very good
I can't help but question the continued usefulness of Wine, though. I recently tried to run some apps in Wine and failed. I ended up just running the app (and several others) in a VM (VirtualBox) - a no-muss, no-fuss solution.
Do we actually need Wine anymore?
Oblivion is pretty playable inside Wine, even on my 2008-era processor and some people have got Fallout 3 going, though I haven't.
To the best of my knowledge - and I did a lot of Googling when Windows 7 ate itself the other week - no-one has ever got either game working inside a VM, it's just too resource-intensive.
15 years got them the ability to run most apps that required Windows 2000, quite a few that required XP, as well as apps using the old Win16 APIs. How long did it take Microsoft to get to the same place?
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You're almost certainly not alone in this. A lot of small businesses that I've come across have had some custom VB4 app that they depended on. A few of them have even kept Win 3.11 machines around to run it (Win 3.11 runs really fast on a 200MHz Pentium). Since about five years ago, it's been more likely that these apps will run on *NIX with WINE than on a recent version of Windows.
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It was certainly a contributing factor, but OS/2's lack of support for Win32 and the lack of good cross-platform toolkits at the time probably contributed more. In the Win16 days, you could write a Win16 app and it ran natively on OS/2 and Windows 3.x. That's great - you get the OS/2 market for free. If your app would benefit from being a full 32-bit app, then you could use the native OS/2 APIs. Then came Windows 95, with a new set of (mostly backwards compatible) 32-bit APIs, which weren't supported by OS/2. The largest market was still Win3.x, so most developers stuck with supporting that, using win16 plus the subset of win32 that worked with win32s, just doing two builds. When enough people had Windows 95 installed, they moved to win32, and excluded OS/2. There was no good way of supporting Windows 95 and OS/2. Now, there are good cross-platform toolkits which let you target all of the major platforms with just some minor UI tweaks for each one.
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And I had the opposite experience. I recently wanted to try running a Win32 game on my Mac, and found that it worked perfectly with WINE. Much less effort than trying to install Windows in a VM - and using a lot less RAM than running another complete OS for one app. Not to mention cheaper - I don't have a Windows license anymore, and I didn't want to spend £100 or so to play a free game... Since I had WINE installed, I tried it with a few other win32 apps I had. The only one that I had problems with was mingw, and it does some deeply horrible things.
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Well, actually the Wine project management sabotages progress on key projects, e.g. Saferdisc protection and DIB Engine.
Wine is also available for Mac OS X.
Most things do work. I've been using Wine ever since I made the switch to GNU/Linux. Sure, I may have to hack it sometimes to produce desired results, but it mostly works.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
More aggresively -- WINE is one of the best ways for Linux to embrace, extend, and extinguish -- beat Redmond at their own game.
But not very successfully, it would seem:
Top OS System Share Trend [June 2009-April 2010]
OS Platform Statistics [March 2003- April 2010]
How many FOSS projects - and how many proprietary/closed source programs available for Linux - are ported to Windows or begin as native Windows apps?
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
Is SCO actually dead now? They appeared to go through quite a time of being undead.
I am not sure why your comment was modded as flamebait, I was surprised at the original post's comments also. It is kind of silly to think that Linux with Wine is going to beat Redmond at anything, since they are always following Redmond. Microsoft, like Apple, etc. knows money is made by supporting new things, not old ones. They are perfectly happy to allow somebody else to support a VB4 app if need be, there is no money in that. The only hope there is that they show their customers they will support legacy capabilities for a reasonable period of time.
no comment
i had Oblivion running great around 1.1.25, but somewhere after that it wouldn't run it.
i've read a couple posts where people are blaming the ATI drivers.
has this been fixed?
Had WINE supported that program we would have ~30 computers now running Linux and the business saving money, but because WINE didn't run that program well enough, they decided to stick with Windows.
I would not trust wine with anything critical. I've had too many programs work on one version of wine and fail on a later version. Tons of programs with "gold" reports in the App DB fail to even install for me, let alone launch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In other words you're saying:
Yo darkmeridian, I'm happy for you and Imma let you finish, but Linux with Wine is the best combination of ALL TIME.
I used to but I use transmission now because it works just as well and at least I don't have to worry about it being owned by Bittorrent Inc and not having a backdoor...
You can't legally run an OEM copy of XP in a VM. OEM copies of Windows are only licensed for use as an operating system on the PC hardware they are sold with.
>By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm
Um, Palm's OS, which is WebOS, is just as much Linux as Android is. And it is more open in many ways.
How long did it take Microsoft to get to the same place?
Ouch. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
A $200 retail copy of Windows for virtualization on a desktop PC is not much cheaper than a $200 Acer Aspire Revo PC running Windows. Yes, you need to buy a KVM switch, but the Revo comes with a spare keyboard and mouse to make up for that. The best part: your Windows apps won't slow down your native apps.
Software cannot be implemented without adhering to a set of defined rules.
There are two sets of defined rules. One of them is the MSDN documentation for the Windows platform. Another less defined set is that a specific suite of programs, which by 1.0 included Office 2007 viewers, has substantially the same behavior on Wine as on Windows.
well, it's emulating a platform API (as opposed to hardware)
Any more than a Linux PC's X server "emulates" the X API? Or your Qt library "emulates" the Qt API? If you use the term "emulator" to refer to anything that doesn't involve interpreting or dynamically recompiling machine code, that cheapens "emulator" to the point where every library on your system is an emulator. Where I come from, Wine is called a "subsystem", just like Qt and Gtk+ are "subsystems".
Yes, there's a command-line clone of 7-Zip called p7zip, but some people might need a GUI to wrap around it. Some generic archive manager GUIs just work, such as File Roller in Ubuntu, but do all?
One of, if not THE, main reasons given by people as to why they prefer MS Windows to other OSs (Mac or Linux) is that all of the software thewy own, and almost all of the software that they need/want, runs on Windows and not anything else.
Take that out of the equation and you remove a major hurdle to switching.
The fact that "it's always following" is neither here nor there.
True, but it doesn't help for Win32 Programs that have Win16 Installers. This is likely what GP is referring to; a lot of games of that era (And even for some time after) use 16 bit installers because, well, the publisher probably already had the license and didn't see the sense in paying for a new one. After all, there was no way to know back then how far (or close) 64-bitness was to be on a consumer machine, and even still that x64 would be done in such a way that 16 bitness was not doable.
Some good examples of 32 bit Apps with 16 bit Installers;
-AutoCAD R14 (Sure, it's old, but a lot of old drafting coots prefer it over newer versions, and reusing their existing version is far cheaper than paying the thousands of dollars for a new license.)
-X-Wing Alliance (Released in 1999, and still has a 16-bit installer!)
-Installers for some Wacom Tablet Drivers (Oooh, nothing makes me a sad panda quite like hardware being unusable because you don't have a driver)
Dosbox won't help you with these, alas. Perhaps XP mode in Windows 7 but I certainly don't have the money to spend on Ultimate. VM would work, with a required level of fanciness dependent on the software you're running, (At work, I can get by with using the free VMWare Server for AutoCAD R14 when I need it (Still have to code/debug old R14 LISP Expressions, sometimes things act a little different in the newer versions so testing in ACAD 2007 is never a sure thing.)
But, 3d Applications would require a fancier piece of VM software (Probably, say, Workstation, to do the D3D.) Lord knows how easy/hard it would be to get something like a joystick working with that.
Goodness, it's all the pain in the ass of running a Mac, without any of the smugness!
Wine was testes for virus compability not so long ago.
How ballsy of them to test for viruses! :P
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Do you want a medal? You would have been free to work on Win32, with most of the project focused on 16 bits. At the time everyone had work in progress, and much of that would be taken apart and rendered useless. What's wrong with finishing something before starting something else?
OK, here's your medal. You pointed out the blatantly obvious fact that operating systems were moving to 32 bits. 16 years ago was 1994, the first release of Win95 was imminent, there wasn't a whole lot of testing you could do, the documentation was in many ways still in progress. Petzold's Programming Windows 95 was written in 1996.
In 1994 it plain old didn't make sense. 16 years later I'm telling you it should have been obvious at the time. You want to tell people what to do with their time, you have to be a project manager.
Sure.
Also, I love fish sticks.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I wouldn't mind helping, but: I'm not going to update from Jaunty just to test something "better" than Wine 1.0.1, the synaptic pkg in Jaunty. I would like to see Many Faces of Go work right (no screen artifacts, especially in drop shadows), but JellyFish Lite 3.5 works. Fallout and Fallout 2 used to work under the previous Wine. The only things I want to run are the Windows versionx of SmartGo and Rosetta Stone. Everything else does just fine in Sun's Office. Is Wine 1.2 going to be great? Depends how fast they get it to Ubuntu. And whether Canonical thinks it matters to support anything older than Lucid.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Many of us have laptops that came with Windows XP and paid the Windows tax but have installed Linux... We should be able to use the Windows that we paid for on that hardware.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Was HURD ever alive?
Obviously the reason Macs are being held back. Instead of encouraging native ports to Mac, software vendors don't see the point and use Wine's existence as an excuse to not port.
Wine hurts Mac OS!!!!!
I want this account deleted.
Private trackers often use whitelists for allowed torrent clients.
Utorrent is always on the list and instantly updated when a new version comes out. Linux and Mac clients like Transmission, not so much.
<MonthyPython>I'm not dead yet.</MonthyPython>
When is anything open source dead? I mean it takes only the minimum of fans to keep making "new" releases and it's still technically alive, even if the market share is practically gone. Closed source projects are easy to see, it's when it stops being sold, the developers are fired and that's the end of it. Open source projects just slowly turn into a ghost town where the dust balls roam but where it really only takes one person to resettle to revive it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hi, i just tested two games with safedisc in wine-1.1.13 and none of these
complained "put the original CD into CD-ROM!" I tested:
* Need for Speed Underground 1 ~ safedisk 2.90.040
* Need for Speed Underground 2 ~ safedisk 3.20.030
So it looks like safedisc support is implemented very well.
Must not have sabotaged it very well if it's working...
Here is a good explanation of why the DIB engine isn't integrated yet:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-May/076044.html
In the future, do some research on the topics you complain about.
Right, and the software they always want is the latest version. How many people run Word 97 vs 2003 or 07, or even 10?
no comment
Just consider that one of the BIG targets, namely Windows XP was a sitting duck for something like 6 years (XP Released in 2001, Vista released in 2007 to the general public)... And WINE was not able to get there...
Also, remember the metafile fiasco?.
WINE had excatly the same error. And I will take none of that "they are replicating the functions" crap.
If the WINE team had recognized this metafile crap as a security vuln themselves, they would have boasted about it from here to mars and back, and then added a line in the config files of the form:
WinMetaFileFlaw=x;
[X=0 -> Vuln allowed; X=1 -> WINE team Fix; X=2 -> Reserved to emulate Microsoft fix if and when they release it].
So yes, They had the target sitting still for 6 years and could not catch it. Long live wine!!!!
PS: Now that the folks at ReactOs saw the light and did the changes, maybe we can expect more of both ReactOs AND WINE. First ordder of the day, find a big corporate sweet daddy (like Symian, Eclipse, Xen, et al)!
PS2: Well, I have some good karma I can burn today.
PS3: I am not beein a troll, is my long standing opinion, so if you want to mod me down do it, but not with troll.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
No, they are doing it because the 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM) uses the processor's virtual 8086 mode which is not available under x64. They would have to emulate the whole thing under x54, which is what Virtual PC does already.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
More people than don't want to run any of them at all.
I'm not saying it's perfect: just that cross compatibility is a major issue for non-Windows platforms, and anything that is trying to add compatibility for programmes will inevitably be working on things that are post-release.
Although it has to be said that WINE is getting better and better at running things with no tweaking straight out of the box.
It's cheaper for _one_ person to buy an OEM copy of XP, but once the software works with Wine, it becomes a little cheaper for _everybody_ to use Wine.
Which is not, in fact, a bad thing. If anything, we need to unify Linux even more, so it can start killing some commercial systems.
Hell no! Who is this “we”? Your multiple personalities?
Linux is not supposed to be unified. That is a strength! A good thing. And you know what it’s called?
It’s called freedom!
Linux does not need to win over every last retard. Linux does not need to become a drop-in imitation for Windows. Because that is like telling a spacecraft to imitate a car because people are used to cars. If you run behind something that moves freely, you can never catch up. Because it will have moved on to an unknown spot by the time you have reached its last known position. And even if you catch up, you still are not better and hence there still is no point in switching.
This intentional limiting-itself and dumbing down is just plain horribly retarded.
Oh, and Linux already has won in terms of commercial operating systems (Unixes). It already is dominant on servers.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I think I've seen a 7z option in ark (Debian unstable).
W32 viruses in Wine are mere amusements. Viruses don't use APIs "right" or else the would all need to call W32_create_virus() :). Most attack Outlook or try to take over irq handlers that don't exist. Even the "don't look at task manager" bugs are pointless. The worst is if they tried to delete Z: or other holes outside the "sandbox".
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Good to know, because I'm desperately looking for a link to a strategy game as intricate as Warcraft 3 or even Starcraft that runs natively in Linux. Do you have that link?
My company can't move either until a mult/nest program is available too.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Add either of the 7zip command-line utilities and File Roller will "just know" how to use it.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
runs natively
You're not a very good troll. Try again later.
(Hint: this is a Wine thread.)
No, that is part of the usual Mornington Crescent game. New arguments get invented and the goal post is moved. Max did play according to the rules, tried to satisfy all requests.
The best we have so far is "DIB engine should be integrated into GDI32". This is not a problem, because both Max and AJ share this goal, but if I understand correctly, Max doesn't want to invest the effort (which is a lot) until the current design is validated by inclusion into upstream source.
Asshole! The point is of course that Ben Klein is also no authorative source, because the master has no time to speak his mind. So everyone keeps guessing. What about simple commercial interests or incompetence?
Read the history and read bug 421. There is no way for an inclusion of any DIB engine. When all requirements are satisfied new requirements will be made up.