Ask Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard About the Future of WINE 346
Last week, after 15 years of development, tempered by the need for arduous reverse engineering, the WINE project released version 1.0. What "1.0" means for WINE is neither that the project is finished, nor that it is perfect, but rather that the software runs a small subset of specific freely downloadable Windows applications. That's not to say it doesn't run scads of others, too -- the apps database is proof that thousands of programs run to at least some degree. Here's your chance to ask WINE developer Jeremy White and WINE project lead Alexandre Julliard (both of Codeweavers) about the future of WINE, or any other questions about the project that cross your mind. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply; please ask as many questions as you'd like, but limit yourself to one question per post. We'll pass on the best questions to Jeremy and Alexandre for their answers.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:10 years from now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can answer this one. WINE will still be around and used, because the (by then) 30 years worth of Windows software development will include applications still around and being used.
Also, using 10 years as the endpoint for Windows dominance doesn't address what happens between then and now. It's going to have to be gradual, and as development shifts to a different platform, I guarantee some developers will be tweak their code to run in either Windows or WINE, or use Winelibs to shoehorn most of their application onto OSX and Linux.
Re:10 years from now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wine in a world of virtual machines (Score:5, Insightful)
With virtual machines becoming ever easier to install and use, maintaining a Windows VM on my Linux desktop substantially reduces my need for Wine. Will Wine become an afterthought in another ten years as we move to desktops running multiple operating systems simultaneously?
Re:What about the small unique apps? (Score:1, Insightful)
I suspect the answer is that eventually wine hope's to have a good enough replication of windows API's that anything that works on windows will work on WINE. Also that if you wish to submit a patch to fix a specific program that doesn't go and break other programs, you're free to do so.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Err I am going to go with gaming here.
VM's work great if its something that does not need graphics or direct X processing, but if you want that you are out of luck.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
VMs are notoriously shitty at hardware-accelerated graphics.
But hey, if that ever changes...
Re:Aren't you ashamed of wasting the last 15 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, even if Wine suddenly disappeared tomorrow, it still would not have been a waste. It has taken 15 years for Wine to get to where it is now, but it was being actively used during those 15 years. Tens of thousands of people have been successfully using Wine to get their work done for over a decade. That's a success right there. Moreover, the developers no doubt have found Wine very useful over the years... hence why they continued working on it.
If Wine is a "waste", then so is every long-term software project.
Wine 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Commercial Goals on Wine Project? (Score:2, Insightful)
It isn't all that clear that Vista is stumbling terribly. See the client revenues here:
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar07/staticversion/10k_fr_not_17.html [microsoft.com]
They don't really discuss how much of those revenues are XP and how much are Vista, but they attribute a $1.46 billion increase largely to Vista licensing (read the text under the numbers for client revenue, there is a reference to $1.8 billion that is something else):
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar07/staticversion/10k_fr_dis.html [microsoft.com]
Once they stop licensing XP, they will have to report where the revenues are coming from. Until then, the idea that Vista was a massive failure (rather than a poor success) is pretty speculative.
Re:10 years from now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Per the FAQ, it'll leave Wine as the best way to run twenty years of Windows crapware [winehq.org]. It's about the apps, not the platform.
Re:What about the small unique apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft can't even do that themselves...
Re:Wine on Mac OS X (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:10 years from now? (Score:4, Insightful)
familiarity > sanity.
Just ask 98% of the PC-using public.
Re:10 years from now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Dosbox has a future because it is cross-platform. Wine, on the other hand, only runs on x86. I'd say it has a bleak future compared to dosbox.
Re:What's that, a challenge? (Score:4, Insightful)
"For all we know..." ...first world countries will have reigned in their wanton wastefulness, everyone in the third world will not have want for food, shelter and medical care, media companies will decide that honest content delivery is more important than political statements and profit so will stop the practice of campaign contributions as well as ditch DRM, net neutrality will be enshrined in law and it will be discovered that Santa Claus does, in fact, exist.
Re:What about the small unique apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes there are, and Mono 1.9 is almost there. Unfortunately, Novell don't consider a missing function that affects a real app a reportable bug, as I discovered. o_0
Re:What about the small unique apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes.
Re:Commercial Goals on Wine Project? (Score:2, Insightful)
Crossover vs. Wine (Score:2, Insightful)
The way I look at the crossover vs. wine distinction is: wine is 100% pure "do it right" source code, and crossover is wine plus some code that doesn't meet that standard yet, but does make Office (and other supported apps) run well. (See http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source/ [codeweavers.com] for the hacks in question.)
So really Wine is where the action is for developers, and Crossover is what end users who need Office to run well should run. The only reason Wine doesn't run Office well yet is that nobody's figured out how to do it right yet, and the temporary bandaids that do it wrong but work for now are in Crossover. If you figure out a clean replacement for any of the crossover hacks, they'll gladly commit them into the Wine tree.
In other words, from what I can see, Codeweavers' heart and actions are 100% where they should be from a free software point of view. All apps are permitted to run under Wine. None are reserved for CX.
Does that help?
(Disclaimer: I'm a big Codeweavers customer, occasional Wine contributor, and release manager for wine 1.0.)