What would most aid WINE development?

Susheel Daswani sdaswani at boalthall.berkeley.edu
Thu Nov 17 20:17:14 CST 2005


Hello WINE Development community,

My name is Susheel Daswani.  I am a second-year law student at
Berkeley School of Law.  I am also a software engineer - I used to
develop the LimeWire open source Gnutella p2p application.  Nice to
meet everyone.

For my 'Antitrust & IP' course this semester I am writing a brief
about why I think the remedy in the Microsoft antitrust case was
inadequate.  My main recommendation is that the 'applications barrier
to entry' phenomenon (users like OSes with lot of applications,
developers like OSes that users like) need not aid Windows' dominance.
 This is of course familiar thinking to the WINE community - if a *nix
(or any other OS) could effortlessly run every Windows application,
then we wouldn't have a monopolist over in Redmond, or at least we'd
have some fervent competition in the personal desktop OS space.

So my question for the WINE developers is "What materials from
Microsoft would most aid the development of WINE"?  The Windows API is
of course public, so my guess is that isn't a huge bar to creating
WINE.  So what are the bars?  Is it simply the scope of the project? 
Is there information that MS could divulge that would greatly aid the
WINE effort?  Would open sourcing part of Windows help?

I plan to use your answers for no other purpose than educating my
professor on what, alas, *could* have been done to help restore
competition to the personal desktop OS market.

Thanks very much!
Susheel Daswani
http://www.susheeldaswani.com
sdaswani at boalthall.berkeley.edu



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