Re: Problem with InstallShield (Was Re: [Bug 629] Changed - Problem with InstallShield: ole:CoTreatAsClass(stub), ole:CoGetClassObject)

On May 8, 2002 07:11 pm, Ove Kaaven wrote:

> I'm willing to agree that there will be few platforms and uses of Wine
> that will suffer in practice, but I have never been willing to sacrifice
> *any* use of Wine no matter how small. For all I care, the LGPL may make
> good business sense, make us all richer than Bill Gates, and get us all
> the code in the world, but it's *still* wrong to prohibit some uses of the
> code, like non-modular adaption of the code for use on low-power embedded
> systems, just because such use is not something we wanted to think about.
> So ReWind will continue to exist.

Sorry Ove,

And I *still* maintain this is just crap. By this reasoning, MS's arguments
that it's impossible to create a modular Windows is right on the mark. But it's not.

You argument basically resumes to: there may be platforms on which a function
call is prohibitively expensive, and we might want to run on those. Let's stop for
a moment and *think* about this:
  -- 99.9999999999999% of all uses will not be for such platforms
  -- even you agree that there are no such platforms today
  -- we are in A.D. 2002, what are the odds of a 3 bit processor being developed
any time soon? IIRC, Moors Law goes exponentially upward, not down!
  -- even if such platforms do come up, _who_ is going to use them? The "office"
people are out of the question, hope you agree. And the games... well, those are
the most resource intensive programs around, there is 0 probability someone
in the future will design a processor that is as slow as a very slow processor
circa 1980.
  -- again, even in the (0% :)) probability that such a beast will exist, than the
current Wine is unusable as is: it has 1000s of "useless" function calls, countless
inefficiencies, etc. Forget the NDA parts, you'll need a brand new Wine!
  -- yet again, say we have such a dog, and a tiny portion of the users do use it.
And with the function call in place, it's gonna be 1% slower. So what??? Meantime,
the 99.99999999999% of the users suffer for year because the main Wine will
be behind (even if by a fraction) because enormously talented people like Eric
and yourselves (among others) are burning most of your free cycles on work that
might benefit 0.0000001% percent of the users by an increase in efficiency on
their platforms of a fraction of a percent.

Really, it's so sad we have such discussions, hurt our community, 
keep Wine back, hurt users, etc.  over such silly things.

--
Dimi.