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.

(Free software examples include VirtualDub – way too much work to port to Unix properly, so the developer just tells people to use Wine.)

Yep, the developer itself often refers to Wine source code when developing VirtualDub. Another famous example was Google Chrome, where the first version of Chrome was Windows-only. I remember that even Sergey Brin, having a Mac, was frustrated about that. Luckily CodeWeavers was able to make it work in Wine and provide a package, and later Google itself did a Mac and Linux version.

However, those that followed WISE got burned, and burned badly. IIRC, similar things happened to COM and DCOM users.

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.)

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