Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-19 Thread Austin English
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Kai Blin  wrote:
> That depends on being able to test a lot of applications, though.

I'm working on it :-)

-- 
-Austin




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-19 Thread Kai Blin
On Tuesday 19 May 2009 01:45:14 Scott Ritchie wrote:

> I don't think we'll get much traction with this unless we can reasonably
> tell them they only need to test the stable Wine release.  But 1.0 is
> pretty old these days, so they probably won't bother.
>
> I'll add it to my list of evangelism to do after Wine 1.2 hits.  And
> also not-so-subtly suggest this is another reason Wine 1.2 needs to
> happen sooner ;)

There's two sides to this, though. From an ISV perspective, there's something 
as "release too often". I've heard fom many distros that they're not too 
happy about Samba doing a minor version bump twice a year these days. Of 
course I guess a Wine stable release once a year is reasonable, assuming we 
try really hard to not regress between stable releases. That depends on being 
able to test a lot of applications, though.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developerhttp://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
--
Will code for cotton.


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Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-18 Thread Ben Klein
2009/5/19 Austin English :
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> 1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine.
>> 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported.
>> 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine
>> 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.
>
> You forgot:
> 5. 
> 6. Profit!

Off-topic, but that only works with 3-stage plans, thus:
1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine
2. ?
3. Profit!

"Time to go to work, work on Wine, work on opensource today! We won't
stop until we've got opensource, yum yum yummy yum yay!"

Back on topic, do we really take such strongly biased blog crap from
zdnet seriously? The author has done little to no research:
"Which brings us to today. Linux desktops have reached a point of
maturity, polish and sophistication which rivals that found in Windows
2000. Yes, it's not as integrated as XP nor as glittering as Mac OS X.
But it's Good Enough™. What Linux cannot offer to most potential
users, that critical attribute which presently holds Linux back from
much broader adoption on the desktop, is that magical ingredient which
Windows offered to DOS users; being able to all your important
applications within the new environment."
^^ missing a word here ("being able to all your important
applications"). Note that MacOSX also fails to bring this
functionality, but it's not being hammered like Linux is.

I've recently seen the OpenSUSE 11.1 installer in action and, although
Debian is still my preferred distro, I am very impressed. It's all
pretty and snazzy, and YAST has come a long way since I first tried
SUSE. Maybe this is just because Novell bought it, but it's certainly
way beyond the "Windows 2000" level he's claiming.

"Wine is still a work-in-progress and a pain to configure. It
therefore pays to purchase a nicely-packaged form of this open source
technology from one of two vendors: for business apps, CrossOver
Office from Codeweavers, and for gamers, WineX from Transgaming, Cost
is maybe $50, but it will make installing and managing all those
Windows apps under Linux a snap."

For a start, *Cedega* is a subscription service ...

"How to make the vineyard bloom? There are four major industry players
(IBM, Sun, Red Hat and Novell) who have a vested interest in desktop
Linux's success, and therefore much to gain by cultivating the open
source developer community which produces Wine. At the moment Wine is
growing organically; slow and steady. With some well directed nutrient
booster, say in the form of $10 million apiece, Wine will be running
99% of all those thousands of Windows apps within a year."

This makes me LOL. Somehow I don't think money is the problem.

First comment too, only way to go forward is for someone to buy
Codeweavers (and potentially taint Crossover/Wine for the purposes of
getting things to work).




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-18 Thread Scott Ritchie

David Gerard wrote:

2009/5/18 Brian Vincent :


Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine
adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity
contest.  For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop
Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro
about their Photo x2 product.  Or, what about approaching the ISV that
created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design?
Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a
good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ).  I
think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix
minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the
product to an ISV.  I don't think this is something the Wine community
itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine
community who's capable of pulling it off.  I think there's a lot of angles
to the idea that could work.



1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine.
2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported.
3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine
4. Use 3. to add more to 2.




I don't think we'll get much traction with this unless we can reasonably 
tell them they only need to test the stable Wine release.  But 1.0 is 
pretty old these days, so they probably won't bother.


I'll add it to my list of evangelism to do after Wine 1.2 hits.  And 
also not-so-subtly suggest this is another reason Wine 1.2 needs to 
happen sooner ;)


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-18 Thread Austin English
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine.
> 2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported.
> 3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine
> 4. Use 3. to add more to 2.

You forgot:
5. 
6. Profit!

:-)

-- 
-Austin




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-18 Thread David Gerard
2009/5/18 Brian Vincent :

> Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine
> adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity
> contest.  For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop
> Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro
> about their Photo x2 product.  Or, what about approaching the ISV that
> created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design?
> Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a
> good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ).  I
> think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix
> minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the
> product to an ISV.  I don't think this is something the Wine community
> itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine
> community who's capable of pulling it off.  I think there's a lot of angles
> to the idea that could work.


1. Find apps that work pretty much perfectly in Wine.
2. Ask them to declare Wine officially supported.
3. Add them to http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine
4. Use 3. to add more to 2.


- d.




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-18 Thread Brian Vincent
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Steven Edwards wrote:

> doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even
> get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we
> have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about
> situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software
> and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of
> reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major
> inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux
> netbooks.


Kind of a tangent.. but I've thought for a long time Google did something
really right with Picasa: they packaged a canned version of Wine alongside a
canned version of their app.  These days, hard drives space is cheap and no
one notices an extra 20MB of Wine libraries with a set up program.

Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine
adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity
contest.  For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop
Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro
about their Photo x2 product.  Or, what about approaching the ISV that
created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design?
Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a
good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ).  I
think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix
minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the
product to an ISV.  I don't think this is something the Wine community
itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine
community who's capable of pulling it off.  I think there's a lot of angles
to the idea that could work.

-Brian



Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread Steven Edwards
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:53 PM, James McKenzie
 wrote:
> Many companies don't trust Open Source.  They just don't have the assets
> to do a proper code sweep and to see that we do not want to swipe their
> secrets, but give them something better.  Of course, we all know the
> outcome of the Windows versus OS/2 wars:  Windows won and the best
> product went home (it is still available by the way.)

Its not even Open Source though, I mean that's another strike but the
VMware example shows, any sort of legacy solution, virtualized or
otherwise is a major show stopper. Hell, I have enough trouble with
vendors and JVM versions. Try getting support for an application
running under BEAs JVM verses Sun and the vendor balks.

Wine problem is a chicken and egg problem. Most won't support Wine and
so most won't run Wine. The vendors won't support it because most
won't run Wine. And the cycle of life repeats. That compounded with
the fact that as Linux gets better, there is no need for Wine as the
vendor will just target apps directly. Facing both of these situations
I've started to believe Wine won't ever become much more than it is.
It's going to be hit or miss even if it installs, its always going to
be playing catch up.

That's not a bad thing, a niche market is fine as everything has its
place. The wine project just needs to be a bit more flexible as far as
integration goes. I think for a long time we've tried to be too
generic, distro agnostic, etc. For Wine to get more adoption we need
to do a better on that end. Scott and others have been working a lot
to solve this problem with the associations, XDG stuff, etc. We need a
lot more work on the OS X side and that will help us tremendously due
to the size of the market.

OK I'm done ranting.

Thanks
-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread James McKenzie
Steven Edwards wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Dan Kegel  wrote:
>   
>> Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed
>> a second source for Windows :-)
>> 
>
> Maybe a big customer like the DoD would help but I am starting to
> doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even
> get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we
> have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about
> situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software
> and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of
> reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major
> inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux
> netbooks.
>   
Stephen:

Many companies don't trust Open Source.  They just don't have the assets
to do a proper code sweep and to see that we do not want to swipe their
secrets, but give them something better.  Of course, we all know the
outcome of the Windows versus OS/2 wars:  Windows won and the best
product went home (it is still available by the way.)

James McKenzie





Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread Steven Edwards
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Dan Kegel  wrote:
> Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed
> a second source for Windows :-)

Maybe a big customer like the DoD would help but I am starting to
doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even
get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we
have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about
situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software
and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of
reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major
inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux
netbooks.

Thanks
-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo




re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread Dan Kegel
James McKensie wrote:
> WE need to get to the point where most of the common business type
> applications will run in Wine without a bunch of twiddling and fixes.

Well, yes.  That was one of my goals during my big Wine push
( http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-February/062550.html ),
and I think we made a lot of progress.  Still lots to do, as you know.

Sure would be nice if we could convince the DoD they needed
a second source for Windows :-)
- Dan




Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread James McKenzie
Scott Ritchie wrote:
> nn wrote:
>>
>>
>> WINE and the importance of application compatibility
>>
>> http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,100567,10012751o-2000630136b,00.htm
>>
>>
>>
>
> It's a good article, though it's sad to see a mention of "WineX" as a
> serious alternative to Wine.  WineX was obsolete years ago (and the
> consensus about its successor Cedega on the various web forums seems
> to be that it's often substantially behind Crossover Games).
>
The article stated that most of it was a few years old.
> Codeweavers, you need to do a better job letting people know Crossover
> Games exists.
>
WE need to get to the point where most of the common business type
applications will run in Wine without a bunch of twiddling and fixes.
The average "Joe" user will not put up with this.  I've been on this
mantra for a long time.  Build a better mousetrap built on an OS that is
more robust and market it correctly and you will have the world at your
fingertips.  Witness the comparision between Windows and OS/2.  OS/2 was
technically superior but had problems running most of the current
software.  It 'died' and Windows lived on.  The same could be said about
Linux/Wine at its current state.   I need Wine to run a few Windows
applications, one of which will not be made for either Linux or Mac. 
Thus, I have to have Windows compatibility or Windows itself.  I don't
feel like 'polluting' my system, so I need API compatibilty.  Wine
delivers this for me.  The problem is that I need another Windows
program to run.  I'm going to work on it and report bugs as they
occur.   I may also start running Winetest to see what works and what
does not.  Hopefully, with the recent release of XQuartz 2.3.3, most of
the problems have gone away.

James McKenzie

> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie
>
>
>






Re: [Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

2009-05-17 Thread Scott Ritchie

nn wrote:



WINE and the importance of application compatibility

http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,100567,10012751o-2000630136b,00.htm




It's a good article, though it's sad to see a mention of "WineX" as a 
serious alternative to Wine.  WineX was obsolete years ago (and the 
consensus about its successor Cedega on the various web forums seems to 
be that it's often substantially behind Crossover Games).


Codeweavers, you need to do a better job letting people know Crossover 
Games exists.


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie