IBM a reluctant user of Wine software
I was reading an article on open.itworld.com about IBM's reluctance to admit that they use Wine internally while trying to push Linux to the desktop of its employees. The article points out that they are using it to run Lotus Notes.
Reading between lines it is easy (at least for me) to see why IBM would be reluctant to talk about wine. First of all, HAS ANY ONE EVER SEEN ANYTHING REALLY RUN UNDER WINE?! I personally have never seen it work. I've even seen people run Crossover Office and think that it was the greatest thing ever.... for a week. After they had used it for a while and put up with the lock ups and other anoying quirks they just switched to Open Office.
I think IBM and others, like Novell, should concentrate on making OS agnostic applications that can compete with Microsoft dominance. I believe there is a vast market out there hungry to utilize the cost savings of Linux, BSD, MacOS, etc... if they could just break free of the proprietary limitations put on all of us by Microsoft product users.
2 comments:
Truthfully? Yes, I have run some software successfully under Wine -- but I've never even bothered trying to run an office suite. OpenOffice is good enough that there's really no need to deal with the headaches of getting Word Perfect working in Wine.
On the other hand, there are a few simple but essential programs -- things like TroopMaster, for instance, that you simply have to run under Wine, or else you're stuck getting a Windows box. Fortunately, for that sort of program, Wine works just fine.
I do have to wonder, though, about running Notes under Wine. Even assuming that you actually wanted to run Notes in the first place, which IBM probably does, since it's their own product, wasn't there a bunch of noise recently about how IBM was doing a native Linux version of Notes? Certainly there's a Linux version of the server; why not the client?
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