I'm not being hostile. You can read my other 2500 posts to get a sense of my average response. My post might sound more pedantic than normal, but only because Wine issues come up all the time-- so much so that there is a sticky in the feature suggestions thread telling people not to ask about non-Windows ports of this client, since it's basically never happening.
If your point is that mIRC should go open source in order to port it to Linux, consider this: a native client would require an entire ground-up rewrite of the entire codebase. mIRC leverages the functionality of Windows just about anywhere and everywhere. It uses winmm.dll for audio, it uses the GetMessage loop for /timers and various script engine features, it uses SendMessage,DDE and COM for communication, and relies heavily on WinAPI for the UI (incl. dialogs), all the way down to font-rendering and the new multibyte/Unicode data conversion APIs in the 7.x betas. Pretty much everything would need to be redone. The only part that could possibly be reused would be the script parsing code, which, on a relative scale would take very little effort. Therefore as far as a native Linux client goes, open sourcing would not be helpful at all. You're better off starting a completely new project, because that's what would have to be done anyway.
