On Wednesday, November 12, 2003, at 04:28 PM, David Sinn wrote:
I wasn't aware that Microsoft had bought FWB or SoftWindows for that matter,
or were you saying that they should have?
Softwindows was written by Insignia under license from Microsoft. Insignia got the deep access to Windows source code. In return Microsoft got significant rights to Insignia's code. FWB owns the SoftWindows product, but they can't sell it as such because their license with Microsoft is not valid. It's a complicated IP tangle.
(made more so by the apparent criminal activities of the previous management)
And, yes, it is pretty obvious that they are two separate programs, but they
are closely related in intent (much more the Photoshop and iTunes).
Intent, yes. In design, no way. Softwindows was essentially a port of Windows to the host platform. (Insignia also sold it for Unix workstations) You could not, for example, use Softwindows to create a DOS system, much less install Linux.
In fact, Microsoft borrowed heavily from Insignia's work to create the 'DOS compatibility box' in Windows 200 and XP.
VPC is an emulator of the Intel hardware. Windows installers cannot tell the difference between it and a real live intel box.
Real PC is also an emulator of the underlying hardware.
What I
was trying to comment on was what Microsoft might/should/could do if they
wanted to push Linux out, which was the basis for this initial thread.
Nothing more.
And I was making the point that morphing VPC into something like WINE ( which explicitly isn't an emulator ;-) would pretty much require retaining the name and rewriting everything else completely. Why spend the money, then? Particularly when they already *have* such a product: The built-in 16 bit emulator in Windows 2K and XP.
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