Yea well, forget it. [Idea] Different crazy idea, but vaguely related. Why are they using the windows API to begging with? Because they know its alredy everywhere? Reduce download size? Why Photoshop bothered with it then they are huge? Programming environment is really that good? If you simply asked people to install QT and GTK, you think that software companies would start using them? Porting to a different API under the same OS is that hard? You can do a fractionairy transfer(might get ugly)? The logic is, that its much easier to ask people to install something then to install a whole new OS, Firefox is at 26%. With QT and GTK, it would be much easier to run windows programs in there wine equivalent. We could imagine something like http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ "spreadQT" "spreadGTK" (imagine a lot of marketing stuff here) So, all programmers can expect that they will find these libraries everywhere. At least, download size conscious publishers will care. For example utorrent, the 300KB torrent client. Yes, i'm saying to tell people, to just install the libraries, for a good cause. Zero effort, download, install and forget about it. If you have 200GB hard disk and ADSL, 100MB will not kill you. I tried KDE on windows, i just checked kmines, and got MBs and MBs of libraries in the process. We could try to push this with Mozilla, google, IBM, SUN, etc... Long term objective, is to allow far more programs, runing in QT/GTK wine equivalents. Permiting stronger user migration. We could imagine tools that brings down the differences between windows API and QT/GTK. We could imagine something like winelibs, but instead of recompiling for linux, it recompiles for windows, with QT/GTK underneath it. Instead of competing with windows frontally, you do it where they can't scrach. I don't see what they can do against that. We can say, this is a sort of a compromise, you don't want to port to LINUX and others, fine, stay at windows, just don't use windows API, so that we can hack it more easily. The nice thing, is that skills needed to help here are very low. No need to be a genius in C++ .
