Comment porting to WINE? (Score 1) 470
I've wondered if the most useful application of WINE would not be necessarily its ability to sometimes sorta maybe run Windows apps on *nix systems as-is, but as a way for the developers of those Windows apps to more quickly and easily port them to other platforms (and thus an incentive for them to do so). Change everything about your program that doesn't already work with a given version of WINE so that it does, package the result with a copy of WINE (so that it won't be broken by later updates), and viola, you've got a Linux/OSX/whatever port of your software. Arguably inelegant, but in a lot of cases probably a lot more straightforward than porting from scratch.