re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility
James McKensie wrote:
WE need to get to the point where most of the common business type applications will run in Wine without a bunch of twiddling and fixes.
Well, yes. That was one of my goals during my big Wine push ( http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-February/062550.html ), and I think we made a lot of progress. Still lots to do, as you know. Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed a second source for Windows :-) - Dan
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed a second source for Windows :-)
Maybe a big customer like the DoD would help but I am starting to doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux netbooks. Thanks -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Steven Edwards wrote:
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed a second source for Windows :-)
Maybe a big customer like the DoD would help but I am starting to doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux netbooks.
Stephen: Many companies don't trust Open Source. They just don't have the assets to do a proper code sweep and to see that we do not want to swipe their secrets, but give them something better. Of course, we all know the outcome of the Windows versus OS/2 wars: Windows won and the best product went home (it is still available by the way.) James McKenzie
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:53 PM, James McKenzie <jjmckenzie51(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
Many companies don't trust Open Source. They just don't have the assets to do a proper code sweep and to see that we do not want to swipe their secrets, but give them something better. Of course, we all know the outcome of the Windows versus OS/2 wars: Windows won and the best product went home (it is still available by the way.)
Its not even Open Source though, I mean that's another strike but the VMware example shows, any sort of legacy solution, virtualized or otherwise is a major show stopper. Hell, I have enough trouble with vendors and JVM versions. Try getting support for an application running under BEAs JVM verses Sun and the vendor balks. Wine problem is a chicken and egg problem. Most won't support Wine and so most won't run Wine. The vendors won't support it because most won't run Wine. And the cycle of life repeats. That compounded with the fact that as Linux gets better, there is no need for Wine as the vendor will just target apps directly. Facing both of these situations I've started to believe Wine won't ever become much more than it is. It's going to be hit or miss even if it installs, its always going to be playing catch up. That's not a bad thing, a niche market is fine as everything has its place. The wine project just needs to be a bit more flexible as far as integration goes. I think for a long time we've tried to be too generic, distro agnostic, etc. For Wine to get more adoption we need to do a better on that end. Scott and others have been working a lot to solve this problem with the associations, XDG stuff, etc. We need a lot more work on the OS X side and that will help us tremendously due to the size of the market. OK I'm done ranting. Thanks -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Steven Edwards <winehacker(a)gmail.com>wrote:
doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux netbooks.
Kind of a tangent.. but I've thought for a long time Google did something really right with Picasa: they packaged a canned version of Wine alongside a canned version of their app. These days, hard drives space is cheap and no one notices an extra 20MB of Wine libraries with a set up program. Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity contest. For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro about their Photo x2 product. Or, what about approaching the ISV that created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design? Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ). I think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the product to an ISV. I don't think this is something the Wine community itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine community who's capable of pulling it off. I think there's a lot of angles to the idea that could work. -Brian
2009/5/18 Brian Vincent <brian.vincent(a)gmail.com>:
Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity contest. For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro about their Photo x2 product. Or, what about approaching the ISV that created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design? Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ). I think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the product to an ISV. I don't think this is something the Wine community itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine community who's capable of pulling it off. I think there's a lot of angles to the idea that could work.
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine. 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported. 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine 4. Use 3. to add more to 2. - d.
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine. 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported. 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.
You forgot: 5. ???? 6. Profit! :-) -- -Austin
2009/5/19 Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com>:
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine. 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported. 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.
You forgot: 5. ???? 6. Profit!
Off-topic, but that only works with 3-stage plans, thus: 1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine 2. ? 3. Profit! "Time to go to work, work on Wine, work on opensource today! We won't stop until we've got opensource, yum yum yummy yum yay!" Back on topic, do we really take such strongly biased blog crap from zdnet seriously? The author has done little to no research: "Which brings us to today. Linux desktops have reached a point of maturity, polish and sophistication which rivals that found in Windows 2000. Yes, it's not as integrated as XP nor as glittering as Mac OS X. But it's Good Enough™. What Linux cannot offer to most potential users, that critical attribute which presently holds Linux back from much broader adoption on the desktop, is that magical ingredient which Windows offered to DOS users; being able to all your important applications within the new environment." ^^ missing a word here ("being able to all your important applications"). Note that MacOSX also fails to bring this functionality, but it's not being hammered like Linux is. I've recently seen the OpenSUSE 11.1 installer in action and, although Debian is still my preferred distro, I am very impressed. It's all pretty and snazzy, and YAST has come a long way since I first tried SUSE. Maybe this is just because Novell bought it, but it's certainly way beyond the "Windows 2000" level he's claiming. "Wine is still a work-in-progress and a pain to configure. It therefore pays to purchase a nicely-packaged form of this open source technology from one of two vendors: for business apps, CrossOver Office from Codeweavers, and for gamers, WineX from Transgaming, Cost is maybe $50, but it will make installing and managing all those Windows apps under Linux a snap." For a start, *Cedega* is a subscription service ... "How to make the vineyard bloom? There are four major industry players (IBM, Sun, Red Hat and Novell) who have a vested interest in desktop Linux's success, and therefore much to gain by cultivating the open source developer community which produces Wine. At the moment Wine is growing organically; slow and steady. With some well directed nutrient booster, say in the form of $10 million apiece, Wine will be running 99% of all those thousands of Windows apps within a year." This makes me LOL. Somehow I don't think money is the problem. First comment too, only way to go forward is for someone to buy Codeweavers (and potentially taint Crossover/Wine for the purposes of getting things to work).
David Gerard wrote:
2009/5/18 Brian Vincent <brian.vincent(a)gmail.com>:
Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity contest. For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro about their Photo x2 product. Or, what about approaching the ISV that created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design? Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ). I think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the product to an ISV. I don't think this is something the Wine community itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine community who's capable of pulling it off. I think there's a lot of angles to the idea that could work.
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine. 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported. 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.
I don't think we'll get much traction with this unless we can reasonably tell them they only need to test the stable Wine release. But 1.0 is pretty old these days, so they probably won't bother. I'll add it to my list of evangelism to do after Wine 1.2 hits. And also not-so-subtly suggest this is another reason Wine 1.2 needs to happen sooner ;) Thanks, Scott Ritchie
On Tuesday 19 May 2009 01:45:14 Scott Ritchie wrote:
I don't think we'll get much traction with this unless we can reasonably tell them they only need to test the stable Wine release. But 1.0 is pretty old these days, so they probably won't bother.
I'll add it to my list of evangelism to do after Wine 1.2 hits. And also not-so-subtly suggest this is another reason Wine 1.2 needs to happen sooner ;)
There's two sides to this, though. From an ISV perspective, there's something as "release too often". I've heard fom many distros that they're not too happy about Samba doing a minor version bump twice a year these days. Of course I guess a Wine stable release once a year is reasonable, assuming we try really hard to not regress between stable releases. That depends on being able to test a lot of applications, though. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton.
participants (9)
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Austin English -
Ben Klein -
Brian Vincent -
Dan Kegel -
David Gerard -
James McKenzie -
Kai Blin -
Scott Ritchie -
Steven Edwards