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Alexandre Julliard gets job Hacking Wine
Douglas Ridgway writes "Alexandre Julliard, leader of the Wine project, will be moving to Silicon Valley to work full-time on Wine.
See the press release for details.
"
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Jesus, calm down.
I assume your comments are directed at me? How was what I said not true or a flame?
It is a FACT that we have had problems with older versions of some office apps not able to read files created by newer versions. I did not say or mean to imply that office 2000 files could not be read by previous versions. I have no experience in this, I've yet to get any 2000-format files. I just said that it does happen.
And how did you come up with the inference that I think there is a 'desktopdatabase' or anything running on a linux box. I didn't even come close to it. I didn't say anything was bad or better than something else. I was just pointing out an instance where wine might not be a viable alternative to keeping up with ms office apps under win32.
Christ, go un-knot your underwear, or something?
MS will make defeating this project -- with "enhancements" -- priority one.
Hmmm... interesting claim... but a pretty far out one. There's no way that MS can "defeat this project with enhancements" without screwing up backwards compatibility with existing apps -- which is a MAJOR thing at Microsoft. It's why Win32 is (as people repeatedly claim here) a mess -- they can't change things without breaking software that's out there that people use day in, day out.
So what if Wine will always be a couple of years behind? That's still 100's of 1000's of apps that will run on the emulator. That's a massive software base to run.
Simon
[old APIs never die - they just end up in c:\windows\system32]
Coming soon - pyrogyra
While I believe that WINE is a great tool (I use quite a bit myself). I hope this doesn't prevent companies from doing a true port over to all the variants of *NIX. I can just hear a company saying, "Why should we? We can just develop our aplications for Windows, then let all the *NIX people run it with WINE if they need it."
This is a problem that OS/2 had, and part of the reason that it didn't flourish as it could have. Companies could develop for the Win16 environment, then market it for both because of OS/2's Win16 compatibility layer.
Anyways, congratulations to Alexandre, and I hope this will help both him and the development of WINE out!
chown -R us.
I understand that WINE is way different than VMware but with VMware why would we still need wine?
Good for him! I'm looking forward to getting the apps keeping Windows on my HD over to Linux; hopefully this should help.
On a side note, I may not be able to code Wine, but I sure can drink it - anyone wanna hire me?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Now we're able to run ActiveState Perl for Win 32 (I AM joking, y'all).
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
I'd say Wine already picked up the pace. My company's Windows app now sort of works with Wine as of the 073199 release, whereas it crashed shortly after the splash screen with the releases of six months ago. There's still refresh problems with it, but otherwise it's close to usable.
My hope is that demonstrating that it works with Wine will influence our higher-ups to consider a full-fledged port to Linux.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Sorry if I'm getting hooked by a troll, but he has been one of the lead developers of Wine (an open-source project) for several years now (at least three). His open-source credentials are impeccable.
Download the current copy of the wine source from http://metalab.unc.edu/pub /Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/, gunzip and untar it, and run:
grep corel ChangeLog
from the base directory (wineYYYYMMDD) and see how many contributions Corel has made. They've made less than I personally hoped, but they've made quite a few. To be fair, I've poked in that code some, this is not a trivial project. In many ways it is much more complicated than the Linux kernel (I guess that shouldn't surprise any of us!). Corel's team may well be still finding their way around. They may also be concentrating on those things that affect their applications primarily.
They are there and they are doing things...
I doubt this news will do anything but improve Wine's situation. A guy who has done much of the lead work on Wine in his spare time will now be working on it full time and being paid to do so. I can't see how this can do anything but help.
Right, these are good points, just have one comment:
>Oh, the new version doesn't work? Don't buy it.
The only flaw in this logic is something we have experienced IRL here at my job.
We do business with a major client, who, for some reason, is married to redmond and always has the very latest versions of MS Office. They send us documents in Word, powerpoint, excel, whatever in the newest file format, which of course we can't open with the previous version of the same MS Office programs (grr).
So we have to upgrade every machine in the office to office 95, then 97, now 2000 - so we can still exchange documents with our customer.
Now, in the scenario where we are using WINE to run Windows apps and then MS breaks compatibility with the new version, we would be skrewed because we can't excange documents with our Microsoft-happy customer.
As has been pointed out many times, the *most* important applications to many businesses are the ones that have been developed in house in VB/Delphi/VC++/Access/DBase/Whatever. The likelyhood that corporations would/could port these apps to Linux is pretty low.
In house apps nail the average corporate desktop to Windows, so without something like WINE, you'd probably never see Linux on an average corporate desktop.
(The good thing about most corporate apps is that they're unlikey to use the latest Windows voodoo API, so there's no worry about MS breaking WINE compatiblity.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Dump this to a line printer and put it up in the nursery:
A is for ASCII
B is for Beta
C is for, well, C
D is for Drivers
E is for Emacs
F is for free() -- see M
G is for gcc
H is for Hex
I is for int
J is for jmp
K is for Kilobyte
L is for long
M is for malloc() -- see F
N is for NULL
O is for Open Source
P is for Perl
Q is for Queue
R is for Recursion -- see R
S is for Socket
T is for TCP/IP
U is for *nix
V is for Vi
W is for Window Manager -- see X
X is for wimps who can't handle a command line
Y is for Yacc
Z is for ZZ
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Isn't that what the RTF (Rich Text Format) is for? I thought that that was about the only way that Word users communicate with each other.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
That happens to be pretty close to what libwine does. And exactly how Corel is porting their Suite to Linux.
God Fucking Damnit