What would most aid WINE development?

[Susheel Daswani]

Hello WINE Development community,

My name is Susheel Daswani.  I am a second-year law student at
Berkeley School of Law.  I am also a software engineer - I used to
develop the LimeWire open source Gnutella p2p application.  Nice to
meet everyone.

For my 'Antitrust & IP' course this semester I am writing a brief
about why I think the remedy in the Microsoft antitrust case was
inadequate.  My main recommendation is that the 'applications barrier
to entry' phenomenon (users like OSes with lot of applications,
developers like OSes that users like) need not aid Windows' dominance.
 This is of course familiar thinking to the WINE community - if a *nix
(or any other OS) could effortlessly run every Windows application,
then we wouldn't have a monopolist over in Redmond, or at least we'd
have some fervent competition in the personal desktop OS space.

So my question for the WINE developers is "What materials from
Microsoft would most aid the development of WINE"?  The Windows API is
of course public, so my guess is that isn't a huge bar to creating
WINE.  So what are the bars?  Is it simply the scope of the project? 
Is there information that MS could divulge that would greatly aid the
WINE effort?  Would open sourcing part of Windows help?

I plan to use your answers for no other purpose than educating my
professor on what, alas, *could* have been done to help restore
competition to the personal desktop OS market.

Thanks very much!
Susheel Daswani
http://www.susheeldaswani.com
sdaswani(a)boalthall.berkeley.edu

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Susheel Daswani" <sdaswani(a)boalthall.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> So my question for the WINE developers is "What materials from
> Microsoft would most aid the development of WINE"?  The Windows API is
> of course public, so my guess is that isn't a huge bar to creating
> WINE.  So what are the bars?  Is it simply the scope of the project? 
> Is there information that MS could divulge that would greatly aid the
> WINE effort?  Would open sourcing part of Windows help?

One of the problems is that microsoft uses a vague term "Operating System
component" for almost everything one might expect to get free access to. This
includes Internet Explorer and its components including upgrades, Windows Media
Player and its components, MDAC, and many other things like MFC which don't exist
in older Windows versions, and which are allowed to download only for "genuine
windows" users. It effectively removes a visible border between an application,
a redistributable component, and the OS itself. Microsoft simply wants to tell
the users that everything it develops is Windows OS, and therefore is illegal
to use on any other platform. It's nonsense to require an OS license to install
an application.

For instance Office 2003 does not install MFC dlls while its components don't
work without MFC. Since Wine doesn't have MFC, and clearly MFC is not an OS
component, and developing MFC is out of the Wine scope, that's a problem.

-- 
Dmitry.

[Susheel Daswani]

Juan & Dmitry,
Thanks for your answers.  Highly interesting.

So, the extra APIs that MS had to document under the consent decree
(all 290 of them) don't come close to completing the whole picture? 
It sounds like you have to fumble around in the dark.
With regards to what Dmitry mentioned, it seems that MS continues to
commingle OS, middleware, and application code, such that there is no
border between the three.  This lack of visibility between what you'd
expect to be clear API layers is a problem.

As far as scope goes, it sounds like you could use a few hundred
thousand man hours to aid your effort.

In terms of what a court could order, I think remedying the
documentation and scope problems wouldn't be overly difficult.  A
proven monopolist would have a hard time arguing against an order for
complete documentation, even if a few trade secrets were revealed in
the process.  Once the complete documentation is released, and MS is
made to reveal additions/modifications in a timely manner, the VC
money would likely seek out Windows API reproduction plays.  Right
now, it seems that WINE lacks support because WINE is chasing a moving
target (and no one except MS knows what the target looks like)!

Thanks for the information so far, and I'd love to hear more.  Too bad
my paper isn't going to get anything done except fulfill my
requirements for the course. :(

Susheel

[Mike Hearn]

Susheel Daswani wrote:
> In terms of what a court could order, I think remedying the
> documentation and scope problems wouldn't be overly difficult.

Actually I think it'd be very hard. It's not like Microsoft is just 
ULTRA-EVIL here, they often face the same problems we do with 
application developers relying on odd quirks of the way Windows works. 
Every release of Windows involves a massive Wine-style reverse 
engineering effort, on the apps themselves. Then Windows is sometimes 
changed to make apps that were broken by changes work again.

Now I'm not saying all is rosies and posies. Clearly, Microsoft go out 
of their way to screw us over at every possible opportunity. Dmitrys 
example of MFC is one, though I doubt it was intentional (Windows 
includes MFC for ages now because apps that ship with it use it). 
Another example is the way they class Internet Explorer as an operating 
system component, ditto for media player, etc etc.

Media player is a real problem also as many of the new online music 
stores rely on the Windows Media DRM platform, which would be *very* 
hard to implement in Wine for all kinds of technical and legal reasons.
> proven monopolist would have a hard time arguing against an order for
> complete documentation, even if a few trade secrets were revealed in
> the process.

Most of the time, the code itself is the best documentation, and it'd 
take a government with steel balls to force Microsoft to open source 
Windows. That'd almost guarantee its bankruptcy.
> Right
> now, it seems that WINE lacks support because WINE is chasing a moving
> target (and no one except MS knows what the target looks like)!

It lacks support because it's a REALLY REALLY HARD thing! Look at it 
like this.

In its history Wine has had about 700-800 people work on it in its 10+ 
year history. I forget the exact number. Yet, according to the last 
accurate figures we have, about 7000 people work on Windows full time!

In other words for every person who has ever worked on Wine, 10 people 
work on Windows every day. Now, some of them aren't writing new APIs. 
Some do design, others do usability, some do documentation etc .... but 
a lot are writing and implementing APIs. The numbers just don't work: 
how can we match that sheer force of manpower? A DLL like shlwapi that 
Microsoft implemented entirely within one team and one or two releases 
takes us years to reimplement.

The only reason Wine works at all is that Microsoft generally churn out 
new APIs faster than application developers can learn how to use them.

thanks -mike

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:11:30 +0100, Mike Hearn <mike(a)plan99.net> wrote:
> Most of the time, the code itself is the best documentation, and it'd  
> take a government with steel balls to force Microsoft to open source  
> Windows. That'd almost guarantee its bankruptcy.

I thought the current crew were supposed to be big on "cojones". We can  
take on international terrorism, overtly invade two countries, go against  
the UN, tear up the Geniva convention, torture prisoners but can not  
enforce commercial law in at home...?

[No political flames please] just putting the steel-balls arguement in  
context. I think its more likely that M$ is a source of major foreign  
revenue (and just maybe political funding) and they dont want to spoil the  
party.

Anyway , any speculation on all that could be a ML in its own right and  
not very productive here.

BTW. I thought at one stage they were offering source code before the  
judge refused it and was later thrown off the case for being "anti-M$". I  
may be mistaken but I had that from a freind who is a pretty reliable  
source of information.

regards.

[Jeremy White]

> In terms of what a court could order, I think remedying the
> documentation and scope problems wouldn't be overly difficult.  A

Susheel,

Actually, I think the current consent decree made some attempt
to provide for clear documentation.

What failed, in my opinion, was a lack of oversight and
a lack of a clear process to request documentation changes.

That is, the documentation of the API has gotten substantially
better.  However, there is no way for anyone in the
'public' to request a clarification or visibility into this process.
The process is overseen by a committee and they are not responsible
to anyone but the judge.  So, the documentation gets better,
but it happens overnight, invisibly.  We have no way of
knowing that the documenation was improved, and no way of
knowing where further improvements are coming next, and no
way to ask for specific clarifications.

I think Dmitry was quite right in his point as well.
Given that the original lawsuit was over the illegal
use of Internet Explorer, I find it quite bitter indeed
that Microsoft is still able to claim IE as part of the
operating system.  That is, there are a wide range
of applications that will not function without Internet
Explorer.  Their failure is not because of a simple
API that can be replaced with Firefox, but because of
deep interwoven dependencies.  And running IE without
a Microsoft OS license is a grey area; completely hampering
the use of Wine.

So, to summarize, the punishment to Microsoft for illegally
pushing IE and destroying Netscape is...the continued
use of IE as an monopolistic lever.  Nice.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Tom Wickline]

On 11/17/05, Susheel Daswani <sdaswani(a)boalthall.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I plan to use your answers for no other purpose than educating my
> professor on what, alas, *could* have been done to help restore
> competition to the personal desktop OS market.

Hello,

The only real remedy to the Microsoft Monopoly would be if Federal,
State, Provinces & Local Governments of this planet to mandate the use
of true OSS software.
There is a small movement in Massachusetts to move to OpenDoc but im
afraid Microsoft
has already used it influence in this matter.

Please see : http://www.consortiuminfo.org/newsblog/blog.php?ID=1745

There is however hope that millions may be given the chance to see
what a world looks like without being beholden to the BORG! I'm sure
Bill & company have some grand ideas on how they can derail this train
as well, but it looks bright at the moment. :-)

Watch the Webcast here : http://laptop.media.mit.edu/news.html

The short answer of how to restore the competition to the personal
desktop OS market is
for the people of this country to elect a real president, a visionary
like Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1906, at the behest (promise) of Roosevelt, the Justice Department
filed suit, charging that Standard engaged in monopoly practices by
attempting to control trading and commerce in petroleum and its
by-products, thus setting the stage for the first titanic battle
between government and big business.

A decision was handed down against the company by a Missouri circuit
court in 1909. Shades of Microsoft and Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller
himself testified in a "well-rehearsed performance but to no avail."
[Charles Geisst]. The court ordered the breakup of the trust. Standard
immediately appealed to the Supreme Court but lost.

http://www.buyandhold.com/bh/en/education/history/2000/standard_oil2.html

Tom