Ask Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard About the Future of WINE

Tag : FRP Fitting

> do you see a conflict of interest in wine not directlysupporting
> MSOffice 2K at the gold level?
I want to use your excellect question as a springboard to expand toa broader question about the relationship between Codeweavers,Crossover Office and Wine.
I realize Crossover is what keeps you guys fed, clothed, etc. andmore importantly for us users, adding code to the Wine repo. Butthere appear to be some downsides as well.
For example, take the original poster's question. CX has supportedvarious versions of Office since the first release (since youactually managed to sell copies it is safe to assume the firstrelease would run a version of Office well enough to have happycustomers) but Wine isn't known to reliably run ANY version ofOffice with anything that would be called reliability. Is thissomething that will always be true, to drive sales of CX? Wouldoutside contributions that removed these limitations from Wine evenbe merged?
More importantly than these specific questions, these issues andboundaries between Wine and CX aren't clearly spelled out. Thisbecomes even more important now that Codeweavers is expanding thecommercial product line into a game oriented product. We allrealize Cedega is a bunch of leeches and probably won't ever becontributing anything of value back to Wine but if Codeweavers(meaning 'yall) also stop putting major functionality back intoWine or worse declining to merge competing versions...... Lots ofquestions, few answers.
But the biggest question I can come up with is this one. What wouldbe the point of me (me taken as generic) considering looking atWine with an eye to contributing unless I am first a CrossoverOffice customer? Because the odds are good that any particularmissing feature in Wine is already implemented in CX, so one wouldfirst want to test there to avoid reinventing a wheel that probablywouldn't get merged anyway. So logically it is hard to see amotivation to contribute to Wine directly, and contributing to CXas an unpaid volunteer doesn't exactly give most free softwaredevels a warm fuzzy feeling.
Mixed Free/Closed models are always a tricky balancing act. Clearlylaying out what apps will be permitted to run under Wine and whichwill be reserved for CX would help people see where that line isgoing to be drawn.