Jonathan Wilson wrote:
Its highly likely that GCC and WINE are already infringing on some software patent somewhere (since its well nigh impossible not to in the current "patent everything you can" climate inside a number of big companies)
What makes this particular borland patent any different?
Borland has more money than Wine. There are several groups besides Microsoft and IBM that would benefit from not having to write and maintain an extra codebase to run their product on Linux. Wine needs to partner with some of these people both for money and also for development help. Wine has gotten to the point where it is becoming a very excellent piece of code that looks rough. From past experience this means it is about ready for big time use with all the problems that entails.