[ Thanks to Tom
Wickline for this link. ]
“Needless to say, this is no small project and will
take a long time to complete; right now, I’d call it somewhere
between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs
Skype, at least.) I’m also concerned that if they ever do get it
anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.“That’s certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to
clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a
block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs.
If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you
don’t need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and
all.“And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing
projects in open-source computing: Wine, which dates back to 1993,
and provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs
implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to
make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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