Why Wine?

To port or not to port, that is the question

For the last ten years, I have worked at companies that ship Windows desktop applications (Knowledge Adventure, Activision, Disappearing Inc., Ixia, and now Google). It has always been tempting to consider doing a guerilla port of my company's applications to Linux. do the QA and support work neccessary for a successful Linux version.

The Chicken and Egg Problem

The problem is, Linux's market share on the desktop is small (say, 4%). That means, sadly, that it doesn't currently make economic sense for the company to QA or support any Linux port I did write. That's right: as much as I love Linux, I recognize that its desktop market share is too small for all but the most commonly used desktop applications to be worth selling for Linux.

But the reason Linux's market share is small is because it lacks desktop applications! This chicken-and-egg problem would seem to ensure that Linux will never have good desktop applications or a large market share.

If only Linux could somehow leap to a 20% or 30% market share on the desktop, it'd be worth doing the QA work neccessary to ship native Linux versions of many Windows apps. But how can it make that leap?

Would it be enough for a few companies to put out Linux versions of their apps? Sadly, no: there are so many companies out there making tiny Windows apps that a few companies sticking their necks out just won't make a big dent in the problem.

Wine: Easing the Transition

That's where Wine comes in. Wine solves the chicken-and-egg problem by providing a way to run Windows applications on Linux. The City of Munich is considering using Wine in this manner to help run some of the 300-odd Windows applications they use. Once Munich and a few other cities are up and running on Linux, new applications will be written for Linux, and the old apps will slowly fade away.

By enabling large organizations to make the leap to Linux without porting every application they use to Linux, Wine will accelerate the growth of Linux's market share.

But doesn't Wine take away the incentive for native ports?

I sometimes hear the objection that Wine is bad for Linux because it removes the incentive for companies to do native ports of their applications to Linux. I don't think that's true, for two reasons:
  1. while Linux's market share is below 10%, there is no economic incentive for most companies to do native Linux ports anyway!
  2. once Linux's market share is above 20%, there will be a strong economic incentive to do native Linux ports anyway, because running a Windows app under Linux will always feel strange.

Wine is key to Linux desktop market share

It's worth drawing the obvious conclusion: because Wine helps solve the chicken-and-egg problem of Linux market share, the Wine project is a crucial if temporary component in Linux's rise to dominance on the desktop.
Last Change 29 Oct 2004
(C) Dan Kegel
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