I really fear that this will end up with vendors loudly advertising linux support and proudly putting linux stickers on their products where everything you find inside are just the same windows .exe files and a readme stating that these will work fine with wine. Which at least is not what I would like to see.
I agree. :)
The main thing the _developers_ should be pointed to(if they care about their product on other platforms then windows) are some decent docs about platform-independent programming :p
Yes, they should. I think developers think about abstracting their development around cross-platform toolkits like Gtk or QT But, then again, far too many developers don't now, and probably won't ever. So what then?
Maybe it's just me but when reading all this I got the feeling that writing windows applications(which work with wine) is just *the* way to go. Why the hell are we running linux then?
I agree here too. Maybe this is slightly off topic in this thread, but I still have some concerns about wine's ability to run apps. Right now, development of wine is centered around getting certain apps to work. Not to mention, I also think that Wine doesn't have a big enough developer base to really address that. Windows is a *gargantuan* piece of software. Over Wine's lifetime there have been about 800 contributors with about 40 active now. I really don't think that's enough to get Wine where it needs to go, especially if we want to market ourselves as a porting solution.
Not that I generally disagree with what you wrote. Actually it's mostly totally fine.And it's definitly a good thing when vendors care about their product running with wine or companies migrating to linux trying to get their highly-specialized-app to work with wine. But imho it _shouldn't_ be the long term solution.
Yes, the site that Dan put together is pretty good. It's got lots of good info. But put yourself in the ISV's shoes. If I had some big commercial product I wanted to port, would I want to use a known unstable platform, that may or may not work, to do it with?
Not that I mean to sound like a pessimist, but I'm really just calling it as I see it. No offense to anyone intended. :)