[Desktop_architects] Re: Portland: How to fix this situation

[Timothy D. Witham]

On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 09:57 +0100, Otto Wyss wrote:
> Dan Kegel wrote:
> 
> >On 12/10/05, Gregory Raiz <graiz at raizlabs.com> wrote:
> >  
> >
> >The wine project isn't monolithic.  Some of the contributors
> >care about gamers; some contributors care about business
> >users.  This situation is good; I see no harm coming from it.
> >Would you prefer game-loving programmers stop contributing to Wine?
> >Their patches don't harm the business users.
> >  
> >
> I just want to emphasize Wine should also care for business users since 
> they have an imminent need for a good working Wine. But to attract 
> business you first have to show them that it's possible, it's a 
> classical hen-egg-problem. This is not the task of the various 
> contributors since they have and should keep the freedom to submit 
> whatever the like. But that's the task of OSDL since it will profit from 
> any success in this area, therefore the OSDL should look for at least 
> one person which can work full time on this task. I don't know if one is 
> enough, that may answer the Wine people. OSDL members should also use 
> their contacts, I'm quite sure anybody involved into the Munich project 
> will happily pay this person if they see a chance to fix some of their 
> problems. Of course this will only yield a gain if a first class 
> reference can be gotten and used in marketing.
> 
    The problem with attracting business users to Wine is their
need for an Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the software
vendors.  Until software vendors are willing to say, "I support
my application on Linux/Wine" business users see it as something
not for them.

   If they have their own applications they are either willing to
look at porting them or rewriting them to Linux so tools that
help with that are useful to them but emulation isn't something
that I have heard as a need from the large scale users of
Linux.

Tim

> O. Wyss
> 
-- 
Timothy D. Witham - Chief Technology Officer - wookie at osdl.org
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