Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 17:30:44 -0500
From: Gavriel State <gavriels@COREL.CA>
Subject: Corel Announcement

WINE folks,

Myself and several other folks at Corel have been following the
development of Wine for some time, and we've reached a few conclusions
that I hope you'll be interested in.  Before I get into too much
detail, let me give you a bit of my background: I've been the
engineering lead for our Macintosh graphics software team for the last
few years, most recently shipping CorelDRAW 8 for the Mac
(http://www.corel.com/draw8mac/).  Since Draw consists of millions of
lines of code written to Win32 APIs, we developed our own
Win32-on-MacOS library that provides both excellent performance and
native UI look-and-feel.  I'm currently in charge of our efforts to
port applications software to Linux and other free Unix variants.
Other members of my team include engineers familiar with the inner
workings of our jBride product (http://www.corel.com/jBridge).

We've been exploring the Wine code for the past few weeks, and we've
done some experimentation (read: hacking) that's allowed us to get an
impressive proportion of Quattro Pro running under Linux.  The fact
that we were able to get this far is a testament to the phenomenal
efforts of the Wine community over the past several years.

This demonstration was enough to convince myself and others that Wine
is an excellent choice for getting our applications ported.  Aside
from the technical aspects, there are a number of other compelling
reasons for us to consider Wine: licensing isn't an issue, as it is
with other Win32 emulation libraries; the fact that Wine is Open
Source means that there's more peer review of code; and most
importantly, efforts to improve Wine so that it runs our applications
well will spill over to other software, helping to make Wine a more
viable solution to run other Win32 apps on Linux.  That, in turn,
makes Linux a more viable platform for users considering the switch
from Windows.

We also contacted Alexandre Julliard and Douglas Ridgway via e-mail,
and they were both very supportive of our participation.

For all of these reasons, we've decided to put our support into the
Wine effort.  We are actively committing engineering resources to the
Wine project.  Once our exploration and evaluation has settled down a
bit (read: we've cleaned up our hacks), we'll begin submitting patches
to Alexandre to review and commit to the CVS tree.  We'll be spending
some effort on getting the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running
under Wine, but our primary focus will be on porting our WordPerfect
Suite 9 applications using WineLib.  We'll also begin participating
publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can
contribute our ideas as well as our code.  You should be seeing a lot
more of us in the future.

-Gav

--
Gavriel State
Project Leader - Linux Applications Software
Corel Corporation
gavriels@corel.com