Killer apps/"selling" points of FC and GNU/Linux

[Per Bjornsson]

On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 22:39 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:30:12 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Qemu might also be a more useful path to windoze license holders for business
> > apps anyway

Virtualization sounds more likely to provide a somewhat sane solution
than emulation to me, how is emulation ever going to be anything but dog
slow? Now, for running the occasional i386 binary on PPC or something,
fine, but for general use? [Note: I'm not against emulation per se,
there's lots of other interesting uses for system emulation but I'm not
convinced that running an OS on top of another for general business use
is one of them.]

> You can run Windows-in-a-box, but then you're not really migrating to
> Linux or free software are you? You're just inventing new ways to run
> Windows but slower. I'm not sure what kind of IT department would go for a
> "migration" based on VMware or QEmu.

Well, it could well be part of a migration path: if there are some
legacy apps stuck on Windows for now, it could be useful to be able to
run those in a VM while the rest of the desktop is Linux. Hey,
apparently some companies use VMware to run crufty old versions of
Windows in a protected setting to keep crap legacy apps alive.

Of course it's not a long-term solution, it's a migration band-aid. Do
you think that Wine is the correct long-term solution in the situation
though? I'd say that one would hope for the long-term fix to be a sane
combination of native apps and web apps etc.

> As for Wine not being enterprise supportable ... well, neither was the
> kernel until companies like Red Hat got involved. They hired kernel
> wizards like you, got behind the product and turned it into a successful
> enterprise product (as did many other companies). Nothing magic about Wine
> that says the same couldn't happen. Already is, to some extent.

Why are you trying to convince Red Hat to pick up CodeWeavers' business
model? ;)

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University