Everhart, Glenn
From:	mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Sent:	Thursday, December 03, 1998 3:25 PM
To:	Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject:	Win32 on VMS, was Re: ??== Windows NT client and OpenVMS on the same time.
In article <1998Dec2.205640.1@eisner>, kuhrt@eisner.decus.org (Marty Kuhrt) writes:
>
>Which brings up two questions;  
>
>1. What about Wine?  Is it a similar type of thing and is there a
>   VMS version?

Don't know about Wine on VMS, but I worked on porting Twin
(www.willows.com) for a while, and somebody may have taken it farther than
I did.  You'd still need MFC though.  Bristol has a license for that,
nobody else does, so once you get Twin (or Wine) working, you'd still need
a legal copy of MFC source code.  Last time I checked (>1 year ago) there
was a note on the willows site explaining that you needed to buy VC++, and
then move the source code (which you then have a legal right to use) to the
other platform.  Since Corel has recently thrown in with the Wine camp 

  http://www.winehq.com/corel.txt

at this point it might make more sense to port Wine than to put more effort
into Twin.  Too bad in a way, because Twin also runs on Macs.

The problem with all of these Win32 efforts is that they are perpetually
playing catchup with Microsoft.  Those millions of lines in NT5 that aren't
in NT4 are there to add extra functionality.  Microsoft may *say* that it's
there to make the OS better, but you can make a fair argument that they are
also there to make it harder to clone. 

>2. Why isn't there an FX!32 for VMS?

You'd need the the Win32 libraries first, then the translator.  Even after
all that it can't handle drivers, so you still end up with a peripheral
free machine. 

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech