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. "

Comments

Re:Future Caveats of WINE

[SoftwareJanitor]

This is a problem that OS/2 had, and part of the reason that it didn't flourish as it could have.

So far this sort of problem isn't happening in the Linux world. I think there are a number of reasons why.

OS/2 didn't provide enough good reasons to write native apps. One problem I think is that also sharing a history with MS-DOS, it really wasn't perceived as different enough from Windows. Linux clearly doesn't have this problem.
I think OS/2 also had difficulty courting developer mindshare because of a percieved deficiency in native development tools (either in availabilty, quality or cost). This is not a problem for Linux which was able to initially draw on the strong history of UNIX development tools (many of which are free) and has now started to attract many of its own or ports from other platforms (such as CodeWarrior). Linux clearly has significant developer mindshare and is quickly growing it, which is something that OS/2 never really achieved.
Furthermore WINE (and Twin and TWINE) is not just an emulator, it is also a porting toolkit. Which should help serve as a bridge for Windows-centric developers to port their code to Linux. Once they have things running, they can write more native apps if they want. Unfortunately, OS/2 never really offered a good way to port Windows code over. In the early days of OS/2 that didn't matter so much, because there weren't very many Windows apps and the Windows API and MFC were't very popular yet, but today a lot of developers feel locked into those or at least have code that is.

Also

[IntlHarvester]

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.)


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Code for Toddlers

[DonkPunch]

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

Re:With VMware is WINE still needed?

[Gleef]

VMWare is proprietary, WINE is Free
VMWare is costly, WINE is free
VMWare requires a Windows license, WINE is independant of Windows
VMWare is by design slower than Windows, WINE is potentially faster than Windows
VMWare isolates its programs from the host machine, WINE programs can interact with programs on the host machine.

VMWare is better for some things, but it's completely different than WINE, there's plenty of room for both.

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