Idea #1413: Windows: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

-57

Written by johnmn3 the 29 Feb 08 at 13:59. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

I used to be philosophically opposed to Wine and it's ilk. But recently I had the epiphany: Linux is succeeding in the marketplace on it's own merits -- now we should embrace windows' binary api. When Linux really starts taking off and devs start porting all their apps to wine (from windows), we slowly evolve the wine api away from windows... So, goble up the windows applications, then slowly "upgrade" the api to alienate them from windows (just like windows does to the rest of the world). Eventually, Wine will become a deprecated appendage and devs will then start developing for Linux natively, thereby extinguishing Windows.

Tags: (none)

Attachments

No attachments.

Duplicates

[Report a duplicate and merge its votes to this idea]

Comments

EMoShunz wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 15:03

there are a number of companies (namely google and adobe) that are developing apps specifically for wine. make wine better, sure, but to pull it away for windows is silly, that's counter productive and creates more division. it seems opposite to the oss philosophy.

johnmn3 wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 17:19

When I say pull away, I mean after "World Domination."

Some say that if Linux supports wine, then developers have no incentive to develop for Linux. Well, if we take the long view, then if, through wine, we fostered an environment where all windows applications could run on Linux, then in a Linux dominant world developers would end up wanting to be more compatible with Wine than windows itself. It is at that point where we should pull a Microsoft (think Office formats) and modify the APIs, so as to slightly break compatibility with legacy Windows -- thus slowly extinguishing Windows.

jarreboum wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 22:12

This seems a nice point of view, but it will never pass the first milestone. Most of the professional (and amateur) developpers in the world code for Windows. Only a few of them are optimizing their code for Wine. The only way to have Windows apps work flawlessly on Windows AND Wind would be to have a perfect Wine software. But as soon as Wine starts to differ again from Windows, users will move back to Windows. The only way to have a user-pull through Wine would be to have a perfect Wine (which Microsoft will never allow) AND a linux offer better enough to bring users to it, and then break the bond. But the perfect Wine is the key. 'Cause you will never have enough coders to your side.

Not even in 20 years, alas.

BungaMan wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 12:31

As you said... "Linux is succeeding in the marketplace on it's own merits"

jiu wrote on the 5 Mar 08 at 07:11

the whole idea of open source development is to collaborate, and incrementally improve. Not to squash the opposition or whatever, extinguish. Besides, using the same practises as someone you don't like is not a good thing.

Post your comment