[H-GEN] A Few Quick Questions

[Robert Brockway]

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On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Nick Kwiatkowski wrote:

> An alternative would be to use the other main point behind the wine project
> and using winelib[1] and port the applications across to Linux. Since these
> are your company's own products you:
>
> 1) Have the source
> 2) Create a new makret space for your product

This is an excellent idea.

Alot of people (even wine users) don't realise what wine really is.  Wine
Is Not an Emulator of course.  It is a reimplementation of the Win32 API.
As such it is possible to compile native unix apps against libwine

If the company in question were to do this they could stop using windows
for development entirely (although I would highly recommend keeping some
windows boxes around for compatability testing[1]).  This would further
reduce licencing costs.  All they need to do is ensure the application
is supported by the parts of the Win32 API that wine has implemented.

They could either modify their app to use only library call supported by
wine, or better yet, extend wine in the areas needed (and feed these
changes back to the wine project).  Plenty of patches to OSS (Open Source
Software) have been contributed because a company needed functionality
that wasn't already present.

This is somewhat more ambitious than the initial request, but an
investigation by one or two people lasting a couple of days would probably
reveal how much work would need to be done to wine to fully support the
product.  If it wasn't excessive, this could be a great way to embrace
OSS at the company.

[1] I guess the company would need to do this anyway.  If they are
developing on Windows 2000 pro they may well keep windows 98 or NT4 around
for testing.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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