Originally posted by droidhacker
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When a company is small, it doesn't have much weight to throw around, and it needs all the help it can get. At this point, any PR is good PR, even bad PR, because getting the word out about the existence is actually more helpful than a negative reputation. However, once the company gets bigger and reaches a certain threshold, bad PR can start to be worse than good PR, because you now don't need or want that small amount of support because you have the weight to throw around. In other words, right now the Linux user base is so small that Windows-compatibility is helpful to Linux. Later on though, Windows incompatibility may be more helpful. Microsoft will start having to bend to Linux, not Linux bending to Microsoft.
Regardless if you agree with that, I will always want to be able to run old Windows programs particularly games on my Linux machine. Wine is much faster than an emulator, so perfecting Wine's ability to run those older programs is great I think. I run many other emulator programs to run old games, don't you? But should new titles be made for an emulator or Wine? No, that's not ideal of course, native solutions are always ideal. Developers do need good, easy APIs though, but surely they know Wine isn't the most ideal API to use for Linux as it is not native. This will matter a lot more once Linux becomes bigger though. Right now, using Wine may be a good way for developers to take care of the 1-10% of Linux users. Ideal for them, not completely ideal for Linux users. That's just the way some developers may choose to view the situation right now from a monetary point of view. If we are talking about non-monetary points of view though then if you want to develop open source, you should certainly be supporting open source operating systems to help encourage that. If you want to get into morals, it is good to do so, too, as you help the poor among other reasons. But, you definitely can't expect most companies to care about morals at all unfortunately...
Any way, my two cents.
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