Thank you all for your replies.
First of all, my conspiracy accusation was meant more as a joke than a real belief. Being a hardcore engineer myself, albeit not in your domain, I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into these types of projects.
Second, the explanation about running Office requiring special hacks makes a lot of sense so from a technical point of view, I understand the reason for having a side release (through Codeweaver) for running Office.
But third, I must say that even though I agree with your general comments that Wine is not targeted to an application but is meant to be a core implementation, but I think having the top most used windows software working on Wine out of the box will do wonders for its popularity (I have no proof for this other than the fact that I personally don't run wine because I can't run Office and I have tried 6-7 times in the last 3 years every time hoping the new release will do the trick). I don't know how much effort it would take to get Office working on Wine but if getting it to work out-of-the-box means putting it on many more systems (leading to more people getting interested, more mileage leading to more bug reports, more people finding reason to get involved to fix bugs, etc.) then the extra effort may well be worth it. And let me say that Office alternatives on linux are not really a solution at this point. For example, even though OpenOffice is good for writing documents from scratch, documents' look and feel is different in OpenOffice than Word and that just forces me to find a Windows machine every time I need to open a Word document.
I don't really know how many people like me are out there. If I am the only one, then I am wasting your times. But if there are many others like me, then I don't think any of you will argue against the benefits and the priority of having Office work in the stock release. Maybe a good way to approach this is to put up a survey or a poll on WineHQ and ask people if they'd use Wine if software X and Y and Z was running out-of-the-box? That way you'd also find out how many non-technical people are following Wine to solve their computing needs.
Thanks again for your hard works. I've been cheering you guys on for a few years and will continue to do so.
Sasan
Brian Vincent wrote:
On 3/28/07, Sasan Iman iman@simantis.com wrote:
I know that if you fiddle around with the stock release long enough you can get MS Office working on Wine as I have on a number of occasions, but shouldn't making this work for everyone be the highest priority for getting Wine to be adopted more widely?! Or is Wine more targeted to gamers which is mostly what I read about on WineHQ?
CodeWeavers isn't Evil. I think everyone involved in Wine would agree with that. There is absolutely no question that without their involvement several core pieces of Wine probably wouldn't exist. For example, MSI, COM, MSHTML, etc. We'd probably still have a good Direct3D implementation though because Stefan is sick like that.
As far as getting Office to work, you and everyone else are more than welcome to work on that. We even have a free graphical regression testing system (cxtest) that CodeWeavers developed that could help you maintain that. Personally, I'd be ecstatic if you'd be willing to work on that.
Finally, I wouldn't exactly say Wine is targeted at gamers any more than anything else.
-Brian