Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
So you mean that all the people that are current voluntering to work of Wine won't work on Wine if it is almost complete just because somebody else have done the parts they need to run their applications and that they will happily pay for the right to use it.
No, I'm not saying they won't work on it when it's almost complete. I'm saying that there may not be enough incentive to complete it if all the parts are available under more or less proprietary licenses. Maybe I'm wrong, but your reasoning that it's OK for people who want games to have to pay for it certainly doesn't reassure me.
In that case it would be disasterous to make Wine run all Microsoft implemented non-core Wine DLL:s because then everybody would just be happy to use the Microsoft DLL:s and nothing beyond non-core would ever be implemented.
It would not be a disaster, but it is certainly a potential problem too. It is a smaller problem first because making the dlls run is about as much work as reimplementing them, and because they are completely proprietary, not half-way open source. But yes, I do think a number of features could have improved faster if people didn't use native dlls to work around the problems.