InformationWeek

OK, that sounds interesting, but Trumpet buries the real surprise of the new OS in delicate language that I suspect is intended it keep PetrOS off Microsoft's radar screens.

Trumpet says "It is well understood that many potential customers interested in PetrOS will have a large investment in 32-bit GUI applications. These will need to have continued support from a new operating system such as PetrOS ... . PetrOS is a system that is intended to coexist with and complement the existing platforms rather than supplant them."

Translation: PetrOS will run 32-bit Windows applications! (See story, "Start-Up Trumpeting New OS" for more detail.)

Trumpet plans to distribute the new operating system as shareware costing in the "$20 to $100 range." Although it's not open source, Trumpet plans to make heavy use of beta testers to refine the product.

Surprisingly, PetrOS has been in quiet development since 1992. The company says: "It is not intended to create yet another desktop language [but rather] to create a system that would load faster and allow better performance without the overheads of resource hungry facilities or excessive feature creep. It was felt that the Unix-based solutions were not the only alternatives ..."

Which brings us to WINE, a Windows Emulator that lets you run DOS, Windows 3.x and Win32 executables on Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris x86. According to the official WINE Readme, "It consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft Windows binary, and a library that implements Windows API calls using their Unix or X11 equivalents."

WINE has been in development for quite a while, but has recently gotten more interest due to the rapid rise of Linux. Unlike some of the more rabid *NIX fans, the people in the WINE project--like the folks at Trumpet--are clear-eyed and know that most enterprises aren't going to roll all their current Windows applications into a dumpster just because a new non-Microsoft operating system is available. Instead, WINE and PetrOS both seek to gain acceptance by allowing users to continue to deploy their existing applications software while trying or transitioning to a new platform. That's smart, and it has a far greater chance of success than the purists' approach of simply banning outright the use of any software emanating from the Evil Redmondian Empire. (That just ain't gonna happen, guys.)

Neither project is ready to roll. PetrOS isn't even quite in alpha yet, and the WINE people freely admit that WINE still has "many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly." And while their goals are similar, WINE and PetrOS are very different; one is open source, the other is not; one is free, the other is commercial; one is a layer atop another open (and free) operating system, the other is the operating system.

But both bear watching. My guess is that if any new platform can unseat Windows, it will be one of these, or a platform like these that lets us make use of the new operating system without having immediately to trash all our existing applications in the process.