At 03:25 PM 2/8/2002, Andreas Mohr wrote:
If Wine wasn't there at all, then the vendor of such a package would have to create *everything* from scratch.
And would probably not be able to do so. So, we'd all be worse off as a result.
It's truly wonderful to have a base of publicly available, truly free software upon which everyone can try to build things (and, if they need to invest money in building them, sell the results when they're done). If it weren't for the BSD TCP/IP stack, for example, there would not be an Internet. It's only because virtually every operating system -- commercial and non-commercial -- could integrate parts of BSD freely that we're able to have this conversation today. (Come to think of it, WINE probably wouldn't exist either.)
--Brett