Windows Interface Source Environment (or WISE) was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on UNIX and Macintosh platforms[1].
[...]
The WISE program, which was discontinued shortly after its inception, was seen by some as a Trojan horse designed by Microsoft to penetrate the Unix market[2].
Comments
Yuhong Bao
2009-09-10 21:21:43
David Gerard
2009-09-10 21:25:43
Roy Schestowitz
2009-09-10 21:51:58
David Gerard
2009-09-10 21:57:58
Dan did a presentation estimating that it would cost EUR 10 million to fix 5,000 open Wine bugs. Anyone got EUR 10 million to make Microsoft's head *really* hurt?
See http://kegel.com/ for other Wine-related presentations.
David Gerard
2009-09-09 12:24:12
Though it's easier just to make the original Windows program work properly in Wine and then tell people to use that. (Free software examples include VirtualDub - way too much work to port to Unix properly, so the developer just tells people to use Wine.)
Roy Schestowitz
2009-09-09 14:00:54
Needs Sunlight
2009-09-09 14:10:32
However, those that followed WISE got burned, and burned badly. IIRC, similar things happened to COM and DCOM users.
Yuhong Bao
2009-09-10 21:15:02
Roy Schestowitz
2009-09-10 21:53:17
trmanco
2009-09-09 12:14:01
Microsoft engaged in similarly deceptive conduct to combat the growing popularity of the UNIX operating system within corporate networks. Microsoft faced a choice: whether to “love it to death (invest a lot of money and kill it slowly) or ignore it (invest no money on the expectation it will die quickly).”Microsoft chose initially “to invest in interoperating” with UNIX, by promoting its Windows Interface Source Environment (“WISE”), a program that purportedly allowed developers to write software to Windows APIs and run the resulting programs on Macintosh and UNIX systems. Microsoft’s plan was successful. By 1996 Microsoft had captured a large share of the corporate market. Microsoft then took the next step in its standard “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook and extended the Windows API without copying its changes to the WISE program. This meant that developers could no longer smoothly port applications to UNIX and Macintosh. In public, however, Microsoft continued to lead developers into believing that this software was still fully cross-platform. In 1997, Bill Gates noted in an internal email that those developers who wrote applications for the then-available software without realizing that it would not port all APIs to UNIX and Macintosh were “just f*****.”57 He was right: Microsoft had successfully extinguished the cross-platform threat to its operating system monopoly. In a subsequent antitrust suit, a district court called this move “a classic ‘bait-and-switch’ tactic.”
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf
Roy Schestowitz
2009-09-09 12:20:59
Yuhong Bao
2009-09-14 19:29:42