Yeah obviously I can't see the future and I don't know what Khaled's thinking. But when there are three "official" statements that there is no intention of developing mIRC for Linux it seems pretty silly to wait for it to happen. Besides those statements though, the circumstances don't seem right to support a Linux version either:
- There is about 6 months to 2 years between each release for a single Windows version of mIRC. Not unreasonable for a single developer project but I think a lot of the mIRC user base would prefer it to be even shorter than that. Adding Linux support would only make development time longer. Probaby much longer.
- Vista is (allegedly) coming out soon. No doubt there's a bunch of changes necessary to make mIRC support the new guidelines etc. - Bad time to start developing for an entirely new platform aswell then.
- There's probably major portability issues:
-- mIRC's been developed by one man since the beginning - God knows what the code looks like.
-- Khaled uses MSVS for development so there's going to be huge amounts of rewriting to make it compilable under Linux.
-- To enable cross-platform development mIRC would have to switch from directly using the Windows API to using a cross-platform library. Especially time consuming since mIRC also uses custom controls for the major part of it's interface (eg. the controls that support coloured text) - Generally home-user Linux users expect software to be both free (as in beer) and Free (as in speech) - of which mIRC is neither. With the vast amount of Tcl bots and open source IRC clients which do fit the free ideals of many Linux users, would mIRC even be that popular on the platform?
Of course all that is just my opinion. <Insert standard disclaimer here>. etc. etc.