Hi Dan,
I read your remedy proposal; nice work.
I obviously like your proposal (hire CodeWeavers to port Office, great idea! <grin>). I'm skeptical that this proposal will be accepted, and I also feel a bit uncomfortable advocating it as it clearly benefits organizations like mine, and doesn't so clearly benefit the Wine community.
However, to answer your question, if you value time (i.e. assume people get paid market wages, as opposed to donate their time), a reasonable off the cuff guess for MS Office support (to make it *really* work) is probably on the order of $1-2M or so.
Please note, that's largely a guess, and includes a large fudge factor because it's unclear how much work Office XP is going to require (AFAIK, no one has brought it up in Wine yet).
We could probably reduce the cost and effort if we had engineers at MS actively helping us (so we weren't always fighting up hill).
As far as undocumented APIs in Office, I know of only one used in Office 2000 (of course, the problem with undocumented APIs is that there may be many more we're ignorant of).
Finally, I think my largest concern with Wine is in securing protection from Microsoft patents.
I've lost some large sales because Mainsoft sales people use patent FUD successfully on my potential customers.
Further, it is unclear whether or not open source projects such as Samba, Mono, and Wine are going to be permitted to play in the post .NET world. My greatest fear is that MS will be able to take some legal action that will prevent Wine from supporting any .net enabled application.
IANAL, so I have not idea as to the full extent of the threat from MS or what a potential remedy would look like, but IMHO, that's a more significant issue than others we've faced.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Dan Kegel wrote:
I'm proposing that Wine be part of the settlement of the Microsoft antitrust trial. See http://www.kegel.com/remedy.html Comments welcome.
I have a few questions for Wine developers, especially the good folks at Codeweavers and Transgaming:
- How much would it cost to achieve full support for
Office 2000 in Wine?
- Is it true that Office uses undocumented Windows APIs?
If so, how many? Are they a significant part of the challenge of supporting Office?
Thanks, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com