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Corel Puts Internal WINE on CVS
I'm pretty pleased to see this one: Corel has put their internal CVS tree up for read only access so that they can more easily sync their
code with the official branches. You can see more at the
Corel Open Source Web site.
REDMOND, WA -- Today's most surprising news is perhaps the document that was leaked from deep within the local software giant this morning. Delays in the bug fixes to the company's upcoming release of their own operating system have not been going well according to this internal memo, dubbed the Groundhog's Day Document. They are experimenting with putting their own brand name on an unnamed distribution of Linux using the Wine emulator. The memo stated, "[I believe] we can do this with about a dozen programmers instead of thousands. We can use the same ones who replace the names of other competitors we've bought out on the products we've acquired from them." It goes on to point out that the only hurdle is if they get caught putting a shrink-wrapped license on Open Source software. "UCITA will make possible a few strategic non-disclosure clauses which will eliminate that possibility." Industry experts indicate that it is too early to make specific predictions, but layoffs are expected.
The real address of the WINE you're thinking is http://www.winehq.com
Hopefully, the lessons Corel learns in binding the KDE UI to Wine will be useful to be abstract UI team for working out what the abstract layer should look like.
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Xenu loves you!
It is intended as a "printer-agnostic" scheme for getting at printing capabilities.
It is somewhat unfortunate that there have been few realistic attempts to really upgrade printing; this is a weakness for business applications.
I don't know but that Corel is creating another "island" not unlike CUPS ; I'd be more impressed if Corel was putting some programmers into something like Display Postscript so as to both make it functional and to help provide whatever integration is possible with XFree86. (There's some "license impedance" that, regardless of any flaming that might take place on Slashdot, is unlikely to change any time soon...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It's kind of an apples v.s. oranges thing.
MS beta = closed source = you can't see what they did differently
Corel beta = open source = you can see what they did differently = if you find a bug you can go fix it yourself and send the idea back to the developers!
InThane
And there have already been patches posted to wine-patches porting some of this stuff over. The announcement sent to the wine-devel list by Gavriel State (one of the Corel people who has been working on wine) states:
<i>We plan to start merging our changes back into WineHQ (ie: making patches out of our CVS commits) after we release. In the meantime, if anyone wants to do any of that work for us, please feel free to submit any patches you want from our branch so long we get credit in the changelog. 8-)</i>
I'm planning to merge in the x11drv/dib fixes if noone gets to them before the weekend, to see if that fixes the problems I've been having with msvideo stuff.
Look in the Changelog if you want to find the sort of stuff Corel has been submitting.
Note - extrans mode isn't working in the preview. Don't know if it'll show up in the post.
If they were, they would work as part of the Wine team, and use the Wine teams CVS server. How much time is going to be wasted re-integrating their changes into the existing Wine tree? How much time has been wasted on duplicate bugfixes.
*sigh*
-- Slashdot sucks.
Well, to be precise, WP 2000 are native apps. They are simply compiled using the libwine libraries that ease migration from windows. Wine is both an "emulator" in the sense that is can be use to fool the application into running under Linux, and a library that allows easy compilation of windows apps as native apps. I fail to see how this could be a problem. Haveing an easy port path from windows to Linux can only be a good thing, and thats all libwine is, and port path.
Yeah, I agree. Printing is a mess in UNIX... it's received such little attention over the years that the system now seems seriously broken. CUPS is nice, but it's just a reaction to the balkinization of printer standards from straight Postscript to proprietary protocols. Ghostscript can't keep up with the new stuff out on the market. While lpd is constantly being updates for security fixes, I don't see many new features, and certainly no thought of integration with proprietary printer drivers (nor should they). CUPS looks pretty nice in this regard.
:-)
I understant patent issues are preventing direct inclusion of TrueType support into XFree 4.0, requiring the use of a font server instead. That seems to leave some kind of Display Postscript X server extension as the best alternative. Since Adobe is never going to play ball, what about the Display Ghostscript project over at GNUStep? I understand there's a new release coming soon, and that the DGS and xdps stuff is getting close.
Boy, MacOS X looks pretty good from this vantagepoint, eh?
As I understand it, Corel is using WINE as a way to make porting windows applications a lot faster, so that someone already heavily invested in Windows software won't have to spend as much time creating a product from scratch if they want it also available for Linux.
At least, that's what I _think_ they're doing.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Wine maintains it's own registry files, and it can read (not write) Win95/98/NT 4 registry files directly. So in a dual-boot situation Windows stuff sees all the registry info it expects, but any changes go only to Wine's copy of the registry so it can never hurt your Windows files.
Pretty much the same idea, albeit on a much smaller scale, IBM NetObjects TopPage for Linux has links to download a base version of Wine required as well as the patches which must be applied on top of it.
- Sam Ruby
I totally disagree. Microsoft is a victim of its own success, it can not change the API as fast as you think. The installed base of Windows NT 4.0, Win95, and Win98 boxes is too huge for Microsoft to consider making drastic changes. Microsoft's strategy has been more making more APIs and has not made too many changes. Any of the changes that have been made to the API, the Wine community has been very fast to respond. That is the beauty of Open Source.
This is a common misconception about WINE. Part of WINE is a Win32 API "interpreter" that translates Win32 API calls to their equivalent Linux/*NIX library calls, etc...
However, WINELIB, which Corel has based it's Office2000 suite on, is a Win32 API layer for Linux/*NIX. It's a library that provides the necessary API calls for natively compiled binaries to use. This is analagous to Cygwin and Interix for WinNT. They provide the completePOSIX/*NIX API layer for Windows. Although MS claims that they have a POSIX layer, it is minimally implemented for compliance only, and does not provide the complete layer.
Heh, I can't diagree with the fact that MS has done this several times in the past. However, most of the changes are at the C++ level, inside MFC, rather than at the Win32 API level. Granted, there have been a bazillion Win32 API's...
- Ken
With this announcement Corel have shown that even though they may not currently have the time to submit patches back, they want to give back something to the developers who have worked so hard on WINe. The BSD-like license of WINe means that they legally dont have to do this.
Kudos to the Corel Wine Developers!
Well, the BTA I signed (The second one they sent me) only has restrictions regarding "Confidential information". It goes on to say that it is not confidential if a) it's WINE b) you had it before c) it will be disclosed after the beta test regardless of what you do.
Tat's simplifying the legal-ese, but seems to cover it. Anyway, a screen shot I can't see as being confidential under any circumstances. Since it gives you no info about the software. And they are going to sell this stuff anyway, right? Screen shots are fair game, IMHO. If they disagree, they'll say so.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It does in fact read Office 97 Word and PowerPoint documents at least. However, some stuff seems to be misaligned sometimes when it does Powerpoint.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
A few things about this are really great:
- KDE look and feel. Man, I HATE the way WP8 looks on Linux. It's so obviously not a Linux application. The KDE look and feel allows WINElib-based programs to integrate nicely with the desktop. Even if you're a GNOME/GTK+ fan, you've got to admit-- a KDE L&F is better than a Windows one.
- Results. Ok, we can complain about companies using wine instead of Qt,GTK, or whatever. But with the expensive of rewriting in one of those widget sets, we'd be MUCH less likely to see these Linux ports, and we certainly wouldn't see them very quickly. I just saw a demo of Corel Office 2000 at LinuxWorld today, and I was VERY impressed. This is also coming from someone who deleted WP8 pretty quickly. The new stuff looks far nicer, and it just blew away the new Applix 5.0 beta, even though Applix even uses some GTK+ widgets now.
Add to this x2vnc (which is available here) which allows you to have a dual-head system with Unix and whatever else. I can just roll my mouse over to my NT box, and do stuff there!
According to http://opensource.corel.com/wine.html, Corel forked the code tree so they could get WINE working with more apps, sooner. WineHQ was taking way too long with modular toolkit support, so Corel split off and developed their own WINE for Qt.
Anyway, Isn't that exactly what this project needs? I would have hoped that WineHQ would be putting more time and effort into important stuff, not fluff like look & feel. Maybe that's why WINE has so far to go.
Hands in my pocket
Dude! You need to try this program:
:)
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
It has different benefits vs. disadvantages than citrix of course.
Here's a screenshot of what you want.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/vinci1.gif
Oh yeah, it's GPL'd too.
I'd be curious to know if it works out for you.
You can get it via anonymous ftp, here. It's actually linked to from their webpage, but it's not very obvious. They probably didn't want to scare non-technical people.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Not necessarly, when MS changes their API, it still has to remail backwards compatible. They can just add new features. But those features have to be relatively well documented for new programs to use it. The result: old (before API change) applications will still run, while WINE will have time to catch up for the API change at the same time as new programs use added functions.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The two trees were last resynced in Wine-991212 (i.e. a little under two months ago).
If you are interested in what's changed, you can try here. That gives some idea of the difference (the statistics quoted are for a diff -u between the current Corel tree and Wine-991212). Essentially, it is a 32 000 line patch, totalling just over 1Mb and affecting 251 files, so it should keep us busy for an afternoon or two :-)
I agree. Corel is showing that they ARE getting free software, as much as a corporation can. They can't justify spending money so that programmers screw around with free software, that wouldn't be in their investor's interests. However, they are contributing to the WINE community in the same way as they are taking from it. IIRC, WINE is BSD-licensed, not GNU, so they don't even have to. They COULD just make the changes and keep them to themselves, but they would rather give to WINE so that WINE moves foward.
I'm really impressed. If Corel becomes a "Linux company" (i.e. Red Hat, Caldera, etc.) then they will probably maintain programming staffs to do generic Linux work like Red Hat and Caldera do. Until then, they are looking at Linux as a way to reposition WordPerfect. Because MS refuses to port their apps, Corel and Netscape will probably utilize Linux to gain marketshare.
Corel is showing how a company that makes traditional software can try to profit in the Linux environment while supporting the community.
Alex
This is the first version of wine that allows me to run Napster, winamp (!!!) and FreeAgent.
It seems to mee that the wine-developpers are finally far enough to release a pre-production version.
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Corel's life blood has been keeping up with the Windows API changes (although M$ shenanigans along these lines are always a problem), so what Wine does for them is allow them to use the code base of the Windows apps to quickly port to Linux.
I'm sure that Corel is as eager as you to see the day when their apps are Linux-native first, then get ported as an afterthought to the legacy MS OS. Until then, there's a purpose to Wine, namely being a stepping stone for Windows apps to Linux land.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
According to their WINE page, Corel's programmers have been working only on the internal WINE source tree, mostly for buxfixes. They claim to have been focusing on it because of "release deadlines for our Linux applications approaching..." Does this mean that they're using WINE as a backend to their Linux apps? I hope not ... I'd much rather run natively complied code. More stable, and a whole lot faster.
Speaking of speed, they also say that they've integrated some KDE-like code to do UI-management and themability. It'll be nice to have more options than "look-like-win31" and "look-like-win95" but what is this going to do for performance? Already, WINE runs anything more complex than Minesweeper pretty slowly -- ever wanted to see Mathematica really crawl?
Still, I'm looking forward to checking out what they've done to the code. Hopefully, WineHQ will start picking through the code right away to merge the good bits with the main tree.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
our company bit the bullet and bought citrix to deal with the M$ world. so when someone mails me a .doc file (argh!), I can run a real windows app on a real windows box, only the display is redirected to my linux desktop box.
no need for emulation at all - other than piping the 'doze display over the net to my host. yes, its not cheap (citrix is a commercial and expensive product) and it does need a big box to run on but it does bridge the gap for those in business who [unfortunately] have to be able to read those stoopid .doc files from a unix host.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Microsoft, public, and beta should not exist together. In fact, they don't.
:) allowing easy execution and porting of Windows applications on/to Linux.
;) and wouldn't dream of freely releasing Windows source code.
Corel is freely releasing their contributed source code changes to an open source project, even though they don't have to.
The WINE license allows you to incorporate the entire WINE project, modify it, not release the changes, and sell it. That's fine, but Corel isn't doing that.
The WINE project is a reimplementation of the Windows libraries and environment on top of Linux, (and *BSD and hopefully all of Unix with a little x86 emulation...
Microsoft, on the other hand, places their products on a very restrictive license, sometimes charges people for beta releases, (and for that matter always charges people for "gold" releases that would be better called beta releases
Heck, they wouldn't even give you access to an ftp archive, and say "check out the alpha Windows daily builds", unless you're a WaReZ d00d. (anyone remember Windows '97?)
I'd be happy with Microsoft if they decently ported *any* of their apps to Linux with WINE, and contributing to the WINE project would be a plus. Because MainWin blows on Solaris and HP/UX, and I've run IE 3.0 and Photoshop 3.0 under Wine so far, so I don't think it would take that much work on their part, and they'd get a decent software port.
The only reason for them *not* to port to Linux is their OS monopoly, because a lot of people would still buy their software. Especially if they tried giving back to the community for once, instead of just taking our money and giving us substandard products.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
... quit your whining.
Corel was in their rights to fork off the open Wine tree at any time and not even share back. I'm certain the project heads at Corel responsible for the winelib portion of the Corel Office for Linux product certainly supported the notion of their control over the release flow and which critical bugs to squash. Corel is producing a product on a time schedule for sale in the commercial world. I'm sure this set a somewhat different agenda than the Wine project leaders might pursue; I doubt the Wine team feels the slightest wrong'd as well. Nor should they. Why choose the BSD license otherwise?
Don't bitch, they gave back.
Wine windows currently look like they don't really belong there, as if they have been transplanted from another system, erm... wait a second, they HAVE been transplanted from another system.
A KDE theme should help them blend in more nicely with my desktop. It would be really great if they could be made not only to look more like native windows but also cooperate more nicely with the window manager. I want them to appear on my taskbar, minimize using the window manager conventions instead of minimizing to a rogue desktop icon, etc. I guess the wine team have their own reasons for doing it the way they have, though.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
From the same page, this is what I extremely like:
:-)
Corel has been working with the WINE community since late 1998, concentrating on those areas of WINE that are required to allow us to complete WordPerfect® Office for LINUX®.
No BS, straight forward: Just develop the things you as a company are going to need in this piece of OS software and release it back to the community. Cheers to Corel!
Thimo
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Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
Releasing source code to developers is not the same as releasing buggy binaries to end users.
Corel has been contributing to WINE for over a year now - this tree consists only of changes they've made since December 12, 1999 and/or patches Alexandre Julliard and the WINE team rejected.
If you think no progress has been made because your favorite app doesn't run, please read documentation/bug_reporting and let us wine-developers know about it. We can't fix your stuff if you sit and stew about it!
The also seem to have created a new look-and-feel theme: KDE.
See their description of changes here.
I think the fact that Corel is willing to PAY its employees to write open source code is GREAT! The only reason they forked (temporarily, to get a specific product done by a deadline - see Their WINE page) is because they wanted a UI (they used KDE) and the real WINE team wanted an abstract UI layer (so WINE wouldn't be stuck with one UI, or have to maintain multiple UIs in the codebase). Of course any programmer (should) know that the real WINE team is right, and I'm sure the COREL team knows that too, but I am very sympathetic with them needing a UI by their deadline. Ok, fine; they develop one, but it shouldn't go into the core WINE, it's just to get the UI job done until the abstract layer is in place (then plug the KDE UI into that). I think COREL's decision to develop exclusively on their own fork is just due to deadlines. Remember, open source projects don't have corporate deadlines, but companies do! Be glad these people are team players, and let them meet their deadlines - then (hopefully) they'll work with the real WINE team to integrate the forks! Give COREL the credit it deserves, they are paying people to write open code. They're ok in my book.
Corel is NOT forking Wine!
- Their tree is a whopping 6 weeks out of sync with WineHQ's. There was last a sync on December 12, 1999 (coinciding with the Wine 991212 release). All their work prior to that date that the Wine developers would accept is in WineHQ's tree already.
- The reason they maintain a separate tree for the moment is that they are beta testing and finalling their apps and need a stable tree (WineHQ's is being updated near-daily, in sometimes architecturally major ways, and certainly doesn't fit that definition).
- There are already patches pending at WineHQ that bring in the 2 interesting items in their tree that are not in WineHQ's (system tray bugfixes and partial WinInet/URLMon DLL implementations). Conversely, there are some features in WineHQ's tree since 991212 that aren't in Corel's, particularly for multimedia.
- Please note that their list of what they've done for Wine on that page represents ALL their work, and is not the differences between their tree and WineHQ. 99.6% of their work is in the WineHQ tree right now.
- There are a few items in their tree that won't ever be merged into WineHQ because Alexandre Julliard (Wine's "Linus") doesn't like them. This primarily includes the KDE look and feel patches.
Please, if you don't understand what's going on, don't make things up. If you must flame someone, head over to ZDNet and check out "Coop"'s hatchet job on Linus, LiViD, and the DVD fiasco...
-Ian Schmidt
wine-devel, in the AUTHORS file, and damn proud of it.