Re: OT UNIX=WIN portable software (was: Why a license for Windows ?)

[Adrian Phillips]

>>>>> "Ed" == Ed Carp <erc@stripped> writes:

    Ed> Van (vanboers@stripped) writes:
    >> I guess I'd invest little on the porting of Windows
    >> applications, unless they address key functionality that would
    >> be useful for UNIXens.  I believe Star Office has a good start
    >> on that, though.  Unless I'm missing your point....

    Ed> And that's where I think you (and a lot of other folks) are
    Ed> missing the boat here.  My underlying agenda here is to get
    Ed> more applications running under Linux, including commercial
    Ed> apps.  No company is going to want to port their killer app to
    Ed> Linux unless (1) it's pretty painless, and (2) they don't have
    Ed> to include encumbered libraries, GPL'd or otherwise.  In other
    Ed> words, they want a source code translator.  I know.  Several
    Ed> of my clients have expressed interest in porting their client
    Ed> to Linux, except they don't want to be encumbered by someone
    Ed> else's libraries that they would have to distribute along with
    Ed> their app.

Well Corel managed it somehow - they "ported" Wordperfect 8 to Linux
after investing time and money (I believe) in helping the Wine
developers make more progress with libwine.

Now how they "ported" the GUI part I have no idea - libwine is
supposed to handle this as the following description may show :-

grannyogg:~# apt-cache show libwine
Package: libwine
Version: 0.0.20000109-1
Priority: optional
Section: otherosfs
Maintainer: Andrew D. Lenharth <andrewl@stripped>
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.2)
Suggests: wine-doc
Conflicts: libwine0.0.971116
Replaces: libwine0.0.971116
Architecture: i386
Filename: dists/frozen/main/binary-i386/otherosfs/libwine_0.0.20000109-1.deb
Size: 2050416
MD5sum: e5cd3bc425bcafc21e9dc81af06cc9e8
Description: Windows Emulator (Library)
 This is an ALPHA release of Wine, the MS-Windows emulator.  This is
 still a developers release and many applications may still not work.
 .
 This package consists of the library that implements the windows API.
                                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^
 .
 Wine is often updated.
installed-size: 5532

I suggest you have a closer look at wine - you never know, it may be
what you want

Sincerely,

Adrian Phillips