New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex

Shisha writes "Linux Planet is running a story about a new Wine offspring. Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too. So why not try to sell it? For marketing reasons they're selling it to corporations under the AclereX name. Their website has a datasheet with more details about what they are actually offering. Unlike CodeWeavers, they don't seem to be targeting individuals at all, they'd rather sell to corporations. So no downloads available, sorry. Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good. Wine Weekly News discusses some of the reactions of the original Wine authors."

OEM emulation layer?

[heironymouscoward]

Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?

Speed up Wine development? Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Transgaming took Wine code before the LPGL change, and haven't gone back.

Do they still contribute to the mainline WINE effort? Has ANY of their code made it back?

or are we just plugging a closed-source commercial product here?

I don't understand.

[Alethes]

Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux? Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively? As long as people can comfortably run MS Office in Linux, doesn't that mean they won't bother learning OpenOffice.org? As long as users can run Windows games in WINE, what will encourage game vendors to create native versions of their applications? I could understand if this were a system being used to facilitate migration to open-source solutions, but it seems that quite the opposite is true.

Give me a clue if I need one.

How about plain old Wine?

[MoxFulder]

Seems like there are already plenty of adequate ways to run Windowz apps under Linux. Just none of them are free software! Will the vanilla Wine ever catch up?

woopty-doo

[Stinking Pig]

CodeWeavers: nice folks with a strong customer service orientation. They produce a product that is generally quite reliable, they'll give your money back if it won't do what it's supposed to, and they have a decent support system.

Transgaming: MIA, zero customer service orientation. The product worked for one of the fifteen games I tried with it, the support forum is very difficult to use, and the emails I sent trying to find a human went unanswered.

I'm sure that some people have had opposite experiences, but after my attempts to deal with these two companies I have no interest in giving money to Transgaming. I'd buy a Crossover Games though.

Speeding up development how?

[SuperBanana]

Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good.

Or it could hopelessly fragment Wine even further. I've run the commercial version of Wine, and it behaved completely differently from the open-source version, which I found to be massively broken(impossible to get set up correctly). It --appears-- that from a useability standpoint for the end user, none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine to work better? Talk about conflict of interest...

Re:Speeding up development how?

[Air-conditioned cowh]

Yes, that hit the nail on the head.

It seems that Wine will forever be in a state of "not quite there" and all the missing pieces of the jigsaw to make it actually work will be proprietry extentions.

Aclerex is not the real competition for Wine. Real competition is when some bright spark codes all the missing pieces as open source. However, I'm in two minds about this since Codeweaver's product is not really that expensive and it solved a problem for me. I absolutely had to get Windows Media Player to run for someone.

Re:Speeding up development how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Codeweavers returns all their code to Wine. Not all changes make it back in since some stuff is way too hacky. That doesn't mean that you can't get their changes, they offer a source version of crossover (without their tools ofcourse).

Re:I don't understand.

[dcuny]

There's also Mono [go-mono.org], the Open Source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework.

The original idea was to implement the Windows.Forms library with some native toolkit. But since it's so dependant on the Microsoft windows model, it turned out they would pretty much have to write it from scratch - or use Wine.

There's also React OS [reactos.com], an Open Source implementation of Windows NT. They've spent most of their effort over the last couple years working on the core functionality. Now that most of the core is working, they can use Wine libraries as the basis of much of the higher level functionality, instead of writing it from scratch.

Hrm... the ReactOS site seems to be offline at the moment. From the Google cache of the announcement of stuff due at the end of Augusy:

• Amongst other features and fixes, this release will include a greatly improved win32k.sys (better, windowing, keyboard support, more routines completed overall), the beginning of an explorer.exe, more controls ported from WINE for user32 (menus, messageboxes and dialogs), greatly improved performance for the standard VGA driver and further work on the NDIS driver.

More options are better. An Open Source version of NT is certainly a Good Thing(tm).

Re:huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Transgaming has given tons of code back to the community. Most if it is rejected though.

Re:woopty-doo

[Anonymous Coward]

You're taking the words right out of my mouth.

My experience with transgaming is slightly better than yours (I actually got both alice and black and white working, which was my intention when I bought winex), however, transgaming isn't helping the wine project advance at all, in stark contrast to codeweavers. And the support thing is very true.

Could make many migration plans "fall into place"

[WoTG]

This seems like a good idea to me. There is bound to be a market for quick, specialized, porting services to Linux. A lot of companies are looking at moving to Linux on at least some of their desktops but in many cases there are one or two in-house or 3rd party niche software products that will prevent migration from happening. For in-house products, it might not make financial sense to rewrite the program. And smaller niche software houses often don't have the time or the Linux market size for their products to justify a "proper" port.

Enter a firm like Aclerex who comes along and says "we can port this for x dollars", suddenly a lot of migration plans fall into place.

Of course this all depends on the cost and effectiveness of the folks at Aclerex.

Re:CodeWeavers is helping Microsoft

[nmos]

Notice how they don't say "for running Lotus Notes," or "for running Windows applications." They only talk about MS Office.

Sure because the majority of Windows users feel (rightly or not) that MS Office is a must have for them. Even a lot of people running MS Works or Word Perfect THINK they are running MS Office.

Or if they hacked the calls, why hasn't Microsoft sued CodeWeavers under the DMCA

On what grounds? Unless MS has started encrypting their Office CDs I don't see what legal leg they'd have to stand on.

What argument did CodeWeavers use to convince people to LGPL the Wine source? They used the envy-based "we don't want others to profit from our work" argument.

Or put another way, "We're going to pay developers to improve Wine and contribute that work back and we'd like some assurances that our competitors will have to play by the same rules". Personally I think of the GPL as just putting down in writing what would otherwise be common courtesy.

Does this help Linux and hurt Microsoft? No . . . quite the opposite, in fact. Microsoft wants Linux users running MS Office, because that keeps them locked in to Microsoft file formats while Microsoft prepares the .Net version of Office.

The people buying Crossover Office are already locked into MS file formats. If having Crossover available means that that's the only MS product they are locked into then I'd consider that a major improvement. Maybe once they see the incredible amount of high quality Free Software available on their Linux boxes they will re-evaluate just how much MS products are really worth.