Subject: $10,000 Open Challenge SpecOpS Laboratories
Here's my take from a technical point of view.
I'd say that the only serious leap they might be able to make is to get some of the winserver into the Linux kernel and/or to use the freedce. There isn't really much more big stuff besides that to do in wine, architecturally I mean. Forgetting about the vxds for the moment, that is :)
Otherwise, whatever they might claim as 'innovative' is really just the grunt work of implementing missing functionality in wine. And that can easily be done in an isolationist fashion, i.e. if they want to develop or reimplement some dlls, they just drop ones in wine (if any) and substitute with their own. They can also link wine dlls with some of their proprietary dlls that implement extra functionality, as long as they stay within LGPL.
The only thing is that so far their PR campaign is all full of spin and hype, which might be just their cultural thing, or it might indicate that we're still talking vapourware.
What's nice though is that I'm pretty sure that whatever they come up with will be reverse-engineered, analyzed and reimplemented back in wine, slowly but surely making their 'innovative product' redundant. Executive summary: down the drain the VC money goes.
Cheers, Kuba