New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex 218
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."
Aclerex (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Aclerex (Score:5, Funny)
huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back? (Score:2)
WineX has a fairly complete version available from CVS. I'm sure there are plenty of stuff they did in that. Intaller and some of their more impressive feats are still proprietary I think, but I would imagine as DX9 becomes the focus, DX8 st
I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
Going from a non-copyleft license to a copyleft license is just going between two forms of open source/free software. (Open source and free software is basically two different groups' descriptions for the same thing.)
(..and I promised myself I wouldn't nitpick any more...)
Re:I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
No, the distinction between them is pivotal to Wine. Under an "open source" license, transgaming can base their product on Wine, enhance it, and sell the modified version without sharing their improvements. Under a "free software" license, transgaming would have to open their enhancements back to Wine.
So which is better? Ultimately, whichever one is consistent with the Wine developers' desires. But I
Re:I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
Your confused. Even RMS agrees that the BSD licence (and similar) qualify as "Free Software" even though it's not his prefered licnese. The ONLY difference between OSS and FS is the ideals/priorities of t
Re:I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
Re:I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
And how about reading this [gnu.org] (which says that the BSD-license is a free software license) and this [gnu.org], which argues for using a copyleft free software license like the GPL rather than a non-copyleft free software license like the BSD license)? (Emphasis mine.)
And how come that both the GPL and the BSD license is on the OSI's list of approved licenses [opensource.org]?
It's because free software and open source are meant to describe the same thing. The two terms are used by tw
Re:I'm nitpicking, but.. (Score:2)
Re:huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back? (Score:2)
(OTOH, some of the stuff in what they sell is proprietary to other people, and they'll never have the right to release that. And this info was also i
Most is rejected?? (Score:2)
Sort of sad if you think about it.
OEM emulation layer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OEM emulation layer? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the main blurb from their site:
Sounds decent enough. "If your business is sick of Windows but dependent upon Windows-only applications, we can make those applications run in Linux."
Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:3, Informative)
You're plugging a closed source product... (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep these things in mind when you think about all of this, though...
They were going to only go after the stuff that wasn't getting active ports and actually encourage native porting work. They turned around and came up with that bastardized "port" of The Sims and Kohan- which had issues out of the box in both cases. The Sims WAS going to be a native app and Kohan WAS a native app that had lost the porting company (Timegate got the rights to the Loki port, but they didn't want to wait and find out it's fate- they went with Transgaming.).
They were going to only work at making Linux gaming possible. Now, they're making game "ports" for Windows and MacOS of console games, but NO Linux versions of the same.
Would YOU trust this bunch?
Re:You're plugging a closed source product... (Score:2)
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then it sounds like the Wine project was not 100% comfortable with the BSD license in the first place.
If you license BSD, you should accept that people may take your code and close it. That's what the truly free software is about.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
So... Truly Free Software(TM) is all about closing software? Thanks for the information.
(Don't get me wrong, I like BSD-ish licenses a lot, because they're less hassle than the popular copyleft variants, but I still think it's (ever so slightly) sad when people release non-free versions.)
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
The source served it's purpose in allowing the spinoff to be made; the license betrayed everyone else's freedom by allowing the spinoff to be closed.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Rubbish. You are ignoring the bit where the original poster reminded you that the unclosed source would still be there. But then, the people who whine loudest in support of the GPL have almost never released a line of free code.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I think it's ok for people to release their stuff under a BSD license, I just believe it's dead wrong to say that such a license is "more free."
Nice adhom as well. I haven't released very much free code it's true (although I've given
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
You can't have a natural right to something that doesn't exist in nature. Licenses are human constructs.
Furthermore, the freedom to "decide on the license" amounts to the freedom to "decide how much freedom others can have", and is therefore a net loss in freedom for everyone even if it's a small gain for the person releasing the code. Hence less free.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
It is a way to ensure no single person controls it. The only way to keep other people from using code is to claim proprietary rights to it; that's all the GPL restricts. Plain and simple, it's the only way to guarantee freedom of code in a world where idea monopolies are granted by the government.
does not result in a net loss of the freedom of original code.
This need not be true for my point to stand. It makes the original code more troublesome to extend
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Software patents make this complicated. You can't create your own version of a patented process. I know you never brought it up - I did because it proves you wrong.
Furthermore, creating your own version of a copyrighted process is tricky. If a proprietary extension establishes a de facto standard, you have to do expensive and difficult clean-room reverse engineering to achieve compatibility, and you hope that the security
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
No, I'm saying that the BSD license suffers from the problem that we live in a world where software patents exist, so a free codebase can be truly extended and extinguished. We agree software patents should go away - I just think it's a bigger and more relevant problem than you'll admit to.
A very apt characterization. "They manage". How do you think an investor would feel about that?
I was facetiously understating my case. They do m
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
source: Forbes Magazine 8/8/03 [forbes.com]
Open source is such an infinitesimally small business for IBM that I doubt the top level executives even now they're fiddling around with it.
They've made a VERY public commitment to it. True they do other stuff (including more software patents than anyone) but the fact is they've
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Group A makes some software.
Group B writes an obvious extension to that software and it becomes a defacto standard. Group B patents that extension.
If Group A originally licensed under the BSD license, tough luck. The obvious extension is now closed and can not be
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
Exactly, patents have nothing to do with this discussion. They are a separate issue.
[...]Group A can probably take control of that patent as a derivative work of their copyrighted material.
Not a chance. Copyright law and patent law are separate legal domains, coming from completely separate sources of authority.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
According to your definition of what free is, the only license that fits the bill is public domain.
check your facts (Score:3, Informative)
Putting Wine under the GPL would make it seriously less useful because one of the main purposes of Wine is to let people move commercial Windows applications to Linux, and that may involve linking with it.
Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:2)
I don't understand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me a clue if I need one.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Tiny market share prevents/slows development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:3, Insightful)
its extremely hard for companies (the money holders) to go cold turkey to a completely different OS (than MS-Win).
Personally I'm only writing stuff for unix/linux and working on transit
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets say we have 2 users, A & B and both would like to move to an Open Source operating system such as Linux however:
A: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is able to run it perfectly under Wine so they they switch to Linux and open source for everything but that 1 app. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Linux support and are investigating open source applications.
B: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is NOT able to run under Wine so they they keep using Windows. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Windows support and are ignoring open source applications because they have no experience with them.
Which one of these users do you think is adding to the demand for OSS software in general and Linux in particular?
Re:I don't understand. (Score:2)
ARRGH! (Well, so I buy a used computer for Win95, and pray that Wine or WineX will get good enough before I can't buy any used computers that will still work. Two projects gives me two chances. I'd prefer Wine, but the odds aren't good.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:2)
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
Portability and GUI graphics models (Score:2)
Until you have a work Office, I'd say no (Score:3, Insightful)
Koffice is faster, but crashes regularly. I understand, I'm using the older KDE (2.x), because I'm on Debian/Woody; but I had installed KDE 3.0 before, along with it's KOffice, and I was still getting crashes.
So there is no version of Office for Windows that I am aware of that works well. As long as that is the case, WINE is good for OSS, not bad. That is, if they can get Office working successfully.
Re:Until you have a work Office, I'd say no (Score:5, Funny)
Add a little more RAM and you will be golden. (Score:3, Informative)
I was pleasantly surprised with OpenOffice.Org on my Mac G3 "Wallstreet" PowerBook running Yellow Dog Linux 3.0. I don't have tons of RAM (192MB) and the proc is only 233MHz (Basically equiv. to a 466MHz PII) but it ran acceptably.
I haven't played with KOffice but since OpenOffice works I might not even put any Redmond crap on the PowerBook. OO.O will indeed open/save any but the most complex MS Offi
Re:Add a little more RAM and you will be golden. (Score:2)
Re:Add a little more RAM and you will be golden. (Score:2)
Nor is the Mac advice particularly great for me, though again it's great to hear: We have a PB3400cs (192 MB RAM max, 233 MHz), PB1400c(300 MHz; 16 MB), and PB190c(not PowerPC). We technically don't have our P
Re:Add a little more RAM and you will be golden. (Score:2)
Packard Hell. My condolences. I mean, really. They made the worst computers ever made. I feel for you.
Anyway, here's the skinny on your Macs. Yellow Dog Linux will install on your PB3400. As far as the the 1400s
Re:Add a little more RAM and you will be golden. (Score:2)
Re:Until you have a work Office, I'd say no (Score:2)
Re:I don't understand. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the more people who install Linux, and who have no reason to dual-boot into Windows, the more financially viable it is to release software specifically for Linux.
Look at it this way - best case scenario is everybody in the world switches to Linux and WINE, largely because it runs all their Windows programs they can't live without, what then? Do you think companies will still wri
Re:I don't understand. (Score:2)
I, like you, prefer to use all Free Software. Since there is Free Software to f
How about plain old Wine? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How about plain old Wine? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about plain old Wine? (Score:2)
Ant better than Crossover Office (Score:2)
GPL? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GPL? (Score:5, Informative)
The packages pulled from Debian and Gentoo is an interesting issue. Basically, Debian and Gentoo are allowedto create packages by the license, but if they do so, TrangGaming will stop contributing to the ReWind project, so everyone loses. It's a tight balance and they've been accused of licensing their code (to ReWind) on a license they don't really mean.
But technically, so far, they're in the clear. The ReWind tree is missing some of the more interesting TransGaming bits--SafeDisc support, for example--which they're afraid of releasing because the US might do to them what they did to Sklyarov next time they have a booth anywhere in the US.
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
Either it's working nearly perfectly, or "occasionally" means when a piece of code is becomming irrelevant. Or they just aren't doing much development. Take your pick. (Or come up with a different reason.)
Re:GPL? (Score:4, Informative)
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/c
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/c
Straight from the webpage you get afer the license agreement.
Modern company names (Score:5, Funny)
Their lawyers suggested this name... (Score:2)
Winem Bindem Linkem and Dumpem.
But their PR department nixed the idea.
The All In One comment (Score:2, Insightful)
WINE is bad because it will discourage people from writing native applications. Native applications are important because they provide a reason for people to use GNU/Linux or *BSD wholesale, rather than flit between a Free OS and Windows. They also mean more innovation and more investment in Free Software, and more Free Software available. Will The GIMP just drop off the map once Photoshop is reliably supported? Will we no longer see native ports of games, with
Re:The All In One comment (Score:2)
AclereX/ActiveX lawsuit? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:AclereX/ActiveX lawsuit? (Score:2)
Aclerex? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and on their front page, they've titled it "Enterprise Migrationware." Please, for the love of God, hire a marketing staff. This sounds like a bunch of geeks getting together and saying "What would PHBs like? Oh, I know, let's make a new buzzword! How about 'enterprise migrationware'? Because, see, it has 'enterprise' in it... and we've added 'ware' to the end..."
No. Please do not name your product with the dot-com bullsh*t generator [dack.com]; it's not supposed to be used in the place of a marketing team. Take this one back to the drawing board.
Re:Aclerex? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, same thing here. Bizarre Latin-sounding names went out of style around May 2002, this is just terrible marketing. How much did this name cost them? Sheesh. There is a perfectly good industry-standard IEEE-approved naming technology, the TLA.
Besides, I still can't figure out who this product is meant for: companies trying to move other people's software to Linux, or companies that make Windows software?
Per
Re:Aclerex? (Score:2)
Re:Aclerex? (Score:2)
It's got to be said - (Score:5, Funny)
woopty-doo (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:woopty-doo (Score:4, Informative)
Transgaming is a different story. I bought a year's subscription and went out and bought Civ 3 and Black and White, both of which are "officially supported." Neither worked acceptably and their support guys closed my support requests without actually helping me.
Basically, I bought a year's subscription without having used their product for anything. I was seriously ripped off.
I've heard from other SuSE users that WineX won't run at all on SuSE 8.2 and that TG doesn't seem to care. I'm sure that kind of attitude will go over really well with their "business" customers.
CodeWeavers is helping Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
CodeWeavers' most promoted product is Crossover Office, which allows MS Office to run on Linux.
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
On the Xandros home page [xandros.com], the main heading states:
> Xandros Desktop now runs Microsoft Office XP
Re:CodeWeavers is helping Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Re:CodeWeavers is helping Microsoft (Score:2)
Microsoft most certainly does not like Wine, or the ability to run Windows programs in Linux. They even threatened to sue some Wine people who wanted to demo Visual Foxpro (iirc) running under Linux in Wine, because it demonstrates the feasibility of running their sof
Extra commas? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Extra commas? (Score:2, Funny)
It's, just, the way, some of us, write. Gotta. Problem:
with;
that?
Re:Extra commas? (Score:2, Funny)
This, post. Suffers terribly
Shows, all, the symptoms.
TomV
Re:Extra commas? (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe it was posted by this guy [xmission.com].
Re:Extra commas? (Score:2)
Some of the superfluous commas even leap exuberantly into the air.
Speeding up development how? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2)
Most of the problems people have with Wine these days boil down to one or two "hotspot"
Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also a regspy On native windows can do the trick for many applications. That and the files from Program\ files (and system32) so you see CrossOver is good for learning and then Original wine is good for the rest of the hous
Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2)
Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2)
Do you realize that you are complaining that Wine, a program to run closed-source Windows binaries, isn't completely open source?
RMS would be proud.
Sounds like... (Score:4, Funny)
Warning: Women who might be pregnant should not take Aclerex, or handle broken tablets...
Serial Experiments Lain reference (Score:2)
Accela causes a change of consciousness and seems to connect people to the "Wired", a huge omnipresent network, without additional tech.
A customer's take (Score:2, Informative)
I was able to play, in 1 years time, WarCraft 3 on 1 particular version of WineX. I don't recall which one, but the successive version broke even that. I tested all the games they purported to support. I have alot of games.
Their forums are forums.. nothing spectacular. The
Could make many migration plans "fall into place" (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Really? (Score:2)
Really? Did I miss something? Has Transgaming ever released their source to the open source community?
Re:No Download? (Score:2)
.:diatonic:.
Re:Am i the only one noticing, or am i completly o (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Am i the only one noticing, or am i completly o (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. They can. The GPL requires that the source be made available either with the binaries, or as a separate download if requested by a possessor of the binaries.
So you can go buy it, and then you're entitled to the source code after you do.
On the other hand, the fork that Transgaming has was based on the BSD license, not the GPL (Wine changed licenses some time ago), so they can do whatever they want at that point, because their source code isn't bound by the GPL anyway.
Re:Good Job, although it reminds me a bit of Activ (Score:2)
What makes you say that?
Re:Good Job, although it reminds me a bit of Activ (Score:2)
CodeWeavers was responsible for the whole Wine split which damanged Transgaming and Lindows.