When you think Microsoft you probably don't think sense of humor. And yet, I'm convinced that Microsoft is going to do a very specific *very* funny thing within our lifetimes.
Maybe. If they do it’s going to represent a pretty dramatic shift away from backwards compatibility, which has always been the biggest defining characteristic of Windows. Probably not for Enterprise, but maybe for Personal?
Yeah, that’s fine for handling some stuff, but there are some very old applications still in use that were coded by a programmer who died twenty years ago who counted on Windows bugs. A lot of companies refuse to spend the money to upgrade or replace those systems, and so Microsoft has maintained compatibility for them ever since. Wine hasn’t reached full parity for those bugs, at least so far.
The key word being so far. A company like Microsoft would be able to ramp up wine development substantially, if they decided to. If I’m not mistaken, these very old legacy 16 and 32 bit apps have to be run on emulators running old versions of windows anyways - in these cases the OS running the emulator doesn’t matter anyways.
True! If they committed back to the Linux kernel and the Wine project, this would be a huge boon. And it might happen someday, I guess; they’ve contributed to other FOSS projects. They’ve also built the WSL which is just one transposition away from a LSW, so who knows.
Maybe. If they do it’s going to represent a pretty dramatic shift away from backwards compatibility, which has always been the biggest defining characteristic of Windows. Probably not for Enterprise, but maybe for Personal?
They would keep backup compatibility using wine. Well, at least sort of.
Yeah, that’s fine for handling some stuff, but there are some very old applications still in use that were coded by a programmer who died twenty years ago who counted on Windows bugs. A lot of companies refuse to spend the money to upgrade or replace those systems, and so Microsoft has maintained compatibility for them ever since. Wine hasn’t reached full parity for those bugs, at least so far.
The key word being so far. A company like Microsoft would be able to ramp up wine development substantially, if they decided to. If I’m not mistaken, these very old legacy 16 and 32 bit apps have to be run on emulators running old versions of windows anyways - in these cases the OS running the emulator doesn’t matter anyways.
True! If they committed back to the Linux kernel and the Wine project, this would be a huge boon. And it might happen someday, I guess; they’ve contributed to other FOSS projects. They’ve also built the WSL which is just one transposition away from a LSW, so who knows.