Wine, Office, and the antitrust settlement

[Dan Kegel]

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:

1. How much would it cost to achieve full support for
Office 2000 in Wine?

2. 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
[e-mail]

[Hetz Ben-Hamo]

On Monday 10 December 2001 18:03 pm, 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 read in theregister.co.uk (it's not there any more) then part of the 
settlement was that they will open the API, but ONLY to COMMERCIAL companies, 
adios open source stuff.
> 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?

Heh, thats a good one. Popping up my Office 2K from my old MSDN subscription 
I had (MS still thinks that I'm subscribed, donno why), gives me this error:

[snip]
fixme:ole:CoCreateInstance no classfactory created for CLSID 
{000c101c-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}, hres is 0x80070005
fixme:advapi:RegisterEventSourceW ((null),L"MsiInstaller"): stub
fixme:advapi:ReportEventW stub
fixme:advapi:DeregisterEventSource (1): stub
fixme:thread:SetThreadExecutionState (0x80000000): stub, harmless (power 
management).
fixme:advapi:SetThreadToken ((nil), 0): stub (NT impl. only)
err:win:WIN_FindWndPtr window 10021 belongs to other process
This installation package could not be opened.  Contact the application 
vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package.

So without the native windows DLL's, you cannot even install it yet.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, Office 2K uses heavily MSIE infrastructure, and 
MSIE still cannot be even installed on wine (without windows), so I suspect 
it's a ton of work to do.
> - Is it true that Office uses undocumented Windows APIs?
>
> If so, how many?  Are they a significant part of the
> challenge of supporting Office?

Well, they did almost anything they can to complicate the word file format, 
so I assume that yes, they did use any trick in the book (and those who are 
not in the book), but again - I didn't see Windows, nor office source code, 
so I cannot say for sure. Maybe other people here can..

[Jeremy White]

> Also, if I'm not mistaken, Office 2K uses heavily MSIE infrastructure, and
> MSIE still cannot be even installed on wine (without windows), so I suspect
> it's a ton of work to do.

This is an excellent and important point.  Office depends on IE,
but with Office XP, you can no longer legitimately install IE
on Linux (the license for IE requires a valid MS license).  Hence,
Wine/Linux would be required to provide a full IE replacement in
order to get Office XP to run...

You have the same problem with DirectX games (although
Transgaming has more or less solved this one), and with
Windows Media Player.

Jer

[Hetz Ben-Hamo]

> You have the same problem with DirectX games (although
>
> Transgaming has more or less solved this one), and with
> Windows Media Player.

I actually checked that 2 minutes ago when I read your mail. I called a 
friend of mine (who owes me some favours) to check the WIndows media issue.. 
(I asked him that 2 days ago)

He checked it a bit and it seems that there are few holes in this license 
agreement, so you have 2 options:

1. You can put Windows media player for free download with a note that a user 
needs to have MS Windows, but *it doesn't have to be installed* on the 
machine. This solution could cover 99% of potential Wine users (or CrossOver 
plugin users/clients) since almost all the workstations machines are being 
sold with Windows.

2. A second solution is to give it to an IP lawyer who can dig the holes 
quite quickly and can give you a statement if you could just put it for 
download without any notes for end-users.

I hardly think that MS will do any problem to CodeWeavers if you guys decide 
to support it. After all - for them it's just means more clients are using 
WMP to watch video/listen to audio and a better selling point of their 
servers..

[Jeremy White]

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
> [e-mail]

[Dan Kegel]

Thanks for the feedback!  I've updated my proposal
a bit based on your comments and those of others.

I do think this is a big opportunity for Wine;
the improvements needed to run Office will surely
make it possible to run many other programs as
well -- at least, as long as they're placed under
the same license as Wine, which my proposal
now stipulates.
- Dan
http://www.kegel.com/remedy.html

Jeremy White wrote:
> 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
> > [e-mail]