Roland wrote:
At 08:35 AM 1/11/02 -0600, Paul Clarke wrote:
My attempt to convince you otherwise:
http://oss.software.ibm.com/developer/opensource/linux http://www.ibm.com/linux
Paul Clarke, IBM
Good, so it really seems that IBM is commited to Linux. Now my question is, would it be too much to ask IBM to spend 1% of that 1 billion for Linux on WINE? Of course we are assuming that a full-featured WINE would DRASTICALLY increase the success of Linux. This would be in accordance with: "...with a shared vision of making Linux succeed." quote from http://www-124.ibm.com/developer/opensource/linux/
If the assumption is true I think those 10 Million would be the best spent part of that 1 Billion. Paul, do you know the people in charge of the Linux sponsoring? How about talking to them about this idea? It would be interesting to hear what they say. Maybe they even don't know about the WINE project...
Many people at IBM know about Wine; in fact a lot of developers there depend on it everyday (IBM is standardized on Notes for messaging...).
Many non developers also know about it, if for no other reason that I've been a pest.<grin>
One senior manager at IBM explained it to me as follows: Most senior management at IBM has been with the company for a long time. Most of those went through the OS/2 era. Many people may not realize it, but IBM put their heart and soul into OS/2 - and were burned very, very badly by it. As a consequence, many people at IBM are understandably very reluctant to contemplate another attack on Windows dominance of the desktop.
This doesn't mean that I think helping Wine would be bad for IBM (or I wouldn't have been such a pest), but it may help folks to understand why IBM isn't very focused on Linux as a desktop OS.
Jeremy