On 12/26/05, Otto Wyss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Okay Dan, lets go back to the work this group was created for. What is
> _your_ answer to solve the top inhibitor for the Linux desktop adoption?
I don't think there's any one answer. The meeting identified several
major inhibitors:
1) lack of drivers
2) lack of applications
3) no coherent path for IHVs and ISVs to easily develop for Linux
(and solving this will help solve #1 and #2)
Two ways to attack problem #3 were discussed at the meeting:
The "portland" effort to make it easy
for installers to integrate apps into the desktop (menus, mime types,
etc.) seems very promising; there is some definite low-hanging fruit
there, and it ought to be able to meet its goal of coming up with
something in the next month or two in time for the next set of distro releases.
The ISV documentation portal idea seems useful. I don't know if anyone's
working on it. (Well, I'm trying to scrape together some content at
http://kegel.com/wine/isv, but that's not a general portal.)
Finally, and this is something not discussed at the meeting,
I'm walking through lists of successful small windows ISVs
(e.g. http://www.microisv.com/archives/category/microisv-profile),
testing their apps under Wine, reporting the wine bugs I find,
and working to get the bugs resolved. Eventually I hope to strike
up relationships with the ISVs whose Windows apps run well on Linux,
get them to try selling to the Linux market using Wine,
and build up some success stories and positive buzz about Wine.
That ought to help overcome the reluctance of large vendors and
enterprise customers towards using Wine to help the transition
to Linux on the desktop.
By the way, there seemed to be a consensus at the meeting that
we should encourage cross-platform development, but it wasn't
top on anybody's list of things to do; it was just understood. For
instance, when we recommend GUI toolkits to ISVs, it was clear
that we should recommend ones that allow cross-platform development.
- Dan
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