[buug] Best XP emulator?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Zeke Krahlin (pewterbot9 at gmail.com):

> Here is a page that lists additional Windoze emulators:
> 
> http://www.freebyte.com/operatingsystems/#emulators

I already mentioned that this page, although useful for listing options 
capable of running MS-Windows, has the problem of lack of clarity about
what the listed items really are.  (Also, some really aren't practical
for running Windows, anyway.  For example, I doubt that Bochs, which
aims to emulate in software all PC hardware from the BIOS and registers
on up, can reliably support Windows.  And why would you emulate the
entire PC, anway, unless you're running some very non-PC-like hardware
using a different CPU family?)

But I thought I'd call attention to other things, too:

1.  Cluelessness about licensing.  There's no clarity about what they
say.  VirtualBox is described as "freeware, open source", Xen as "free", 
VMware Player as "freeware", VMware Workstation as "commercial,
non-freeware", and there is no clue given about Plex86 at all.

I've seen this syndrome before:  It afflicts the overwhelming majority
of software catalogues maintained by traditional IT journalists --
Tucows, ZDnet's stuff, Palmgear's and on and on -- all of them horribly
misleading.  The problem is that they don't understance licensing at
all, and don't know what the terms mean.

You would never know, from reading that page, that Xen is open source, 
that VMware is proprietary, that VMware is proprietary, and that Plex86 
is open source.  And those _are_ the long-term most-basic facts about 
the items listed.

2.  In particular, the telltale words "freeware" and "commercial".
The former term, especially, is a sure sign of confusion.  Consider:
What does it really mean?  Mostly, it has nothing to do with licensing,
and denotes expected acquisition cost.  To old-fogey IT journalists, 
Firefox is "freeware", but so is Adobe Flash Player, because both can be
acquired at zero cost -- even though the fundamental difference is that
Firefox is open source and Flash Player is proprietary.  

Even at that, the category makes little sense:  Is Adobe Pagemaker
"freeware" if a friend gives me his old copy and licence?  Is "freeware" 
limited only to software that can be lawfully duplicated without charge?
If so, why are things like Adobe Flash Player and RealPlayer included, 
since their licences forbid redistribution by anyone but authorised 
company agents?

"Commercial" logically should mean "Can be acquired for money", but 
then why isn't Debian considered "commercial" since (as the page points
out) you can buy prepressed CD sets?


Note:  Even though the page is shown as "Last updated on March 14, 2009",
it has an entry recommending ISOs of "United Linux", the common base
that was supposed to be underneath Caldera/SCO (defunct), SUSE, 
Conectiva (defunct), and TurboLinux.  UnitedLinux has been "pinin' for
the fjords" since 2004, when the SCO lawsuits killed it dead.

Moral of the story:  Don't rely on pages about Linux-related software
written by generic IT journalists who have no idea what they're talking
about.