> So technically if you maintain Wine you are also maintaining all the libraries Wine depends on, and so on. You are confirming that it is a good analogy. If s

> So technically if you maintain Wine you are also maintaining all the libraries Wine depends on, and so on. You are confirming that it is a good analogy. If some lib changes its ABI, in the wine case you need to fix it once: in wine. If you have 2000 Linux ports of games, you need to fix it 2000 times. Your libao example is exactly the problem we currently have on Linux. Nothing is really stable, api and abi breakages happen almost everywhere. You can be careful and pick projects that promise to never break abi compat only to still get disappointed by at least one eventually. And while win32 is not under your control regarding new features, it is by far the most stable userspace api and abi in existence. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 (article and comments)