[plug] WINE and cheese night - the consequences

[Leon Brooks]

Christian wrote:
> Gavin Tweedie wrote:
>> I say wait 6months and itll be nice and close to microsoft quality (ie,
>> runs reasonable, but crashes sometimes)

I say show people some apps running _today_, so that they know that it
can be done, and explain that progress will now be rapid. It's not as if
_one_ WINE and Cheese night in lil' ol' Perth is going to make a
worldwide splash anyway!

Besides, there will be valuable debugging information generated for the
WINE people.

> Try 9-12 months.  And by that time Win2000 will probably be about to be
> released and the whole project will be down the toilet.  WINE is a cool
> idea but the real effort should go into developing native applications.

Yes... and no... I think WINE's real contribution will be in seducing
developers into doing WINEified versions of their Windows aps. Some of
them will discover (as the Blender people did) that it's actually much
easier to write the app for Unix+X and then port it to Windows, than to
write it for Windows and port it to anything else, including different
versions of WIndows - and that the resulting app will be much more
stable. In other words, I reckon we'll get what you want by doing what I
want. (-:

Meantime, there are a LOT of people who, when faced with a choice of
Windows 2000 that crashes sometimes and costs a fortune -or- WINE that
crashes sometimes, doesn't require 96MB (!!), and costs nix, will opt
for WINE. And start using the odd native Linux app! Then MS will be
faced with the task of making "their" Linux emulator as good as "our"
Windows emulator, which will at the very least diffuse their 

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