On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Sunny wrote: > They are the core contributors to wine (GPL). Most of their "closed > license" is about some managing tools to make it easier to > manage/install applications. In most cases you can go w/o them, just > using wine, but for "enterprise" customers there is added value in easy > management. > > I just provided the information for anybody who is interested to > evaluate. I do not "recommend" them :) > >> >> Sounds like something to avoid. Anything wrong with the GPL version of >> VirtualBox? >> > > Paying M$ fee for the Windows you install in VB. Thanks to everyone who filled me in on Crossover and WINE. It's hard to keep track of all these things and how they work. WINE has been around for awhile but I haven't tried it. I'm hoping to be able to dump all the proprietary stuff pretty soon but I'm not sure how it's going to go. Like most at the U I'm still using Windows, but it isn't really doing much for me because most of my real work is on GNU/Linux systems that I connect to remotely from the Windows box -- kinda silly. But once I drop Windows altogether I'm sure I'll discover a bunch of annoyances. By the way, I was very disappointed to learn that Linux kernel has binary blobs in it that are not free software. There is a similar problem with dynamic loading of device drivers leading to addition of non-free drivers to some distributions. Stallman did recommend these distros though: Ututo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ututo http://www.ututo.org/ BLAG: http://www.blagblagblag.org/ GNewSense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNewSense http://www.gnewsense.org/ Mike