[cw-discuss] Wine sabotage

[James Richard Tyrer]

Jeremy White wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
> I'm not aware of any attempt to deliberately sabotage the Wine Project
> by Microsoft.
> 
> Microsoft is certainly very aware of Wine, and not happy about it.
> 
> They do screen for Wine in their Windows Genuine Advantage check;
> that would prevent you from running Windows update under Wine, for
> example.  It may also make it awkward to get service packs for certain
> Microsoft programs.  In practice, we haven't seen much real world
> fallout from WGA - it's limited to things like OS updates.  So again, I don't see
> evidence of deliberate sabotage along the lines you suggest.
> 
> Of course, some might argue that the Windows API is, by definition,
> a form of sabotage <grin>.

I have been totally unable to understand Microsoft's strategy on this.

IIUC, they are now more concerned about having everyone use MS-Office 
rather than everyone use Windows.

Perhaps they just don't get it.  If promoting the use of MS-Office is 
their goal, then the WINE project is helping them.

Actually, from a business standpoint, the logical business decision 
would be to release Windows for X Window (which would run on all *NIX 
OSes that use X).  If they are unable to write this themselves, they 
could hire their licensee MainSoft to do it.

This would be serious competition to WINE and a source of revenue to 
Microsoft.  Therefore, I can't understand why they don't do it.

In the past, MainSoft did offer software to run Windows apps on the Mac 
OS (not version X).  This was not very successful because it required an 
x86 emulator.  IIRC, this did not require a copy of Windows to work.

-- 
JRT