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Windows Browser Plugins for Linux
An Anonymous Coward sent in: "NewsForge has a story about a company called Codeweavers releasing a program that allows nearly all Windows plug-ins such as Quicktime or Shockwave to run on Linux browsers including Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror. The company's aiming the product at the embedded device market, but promises to release a version for the desktop, too."
When Quicktime is running on Windows, it is rumoured that it is actually emulating a Macintosh toolbox underneath. This would be a lot of work, since you have to move from the quick RISC math of a PowerPC to the slower math x86 units. You also have to let go of the many built in ROM functions available on the Macintosh. This can be seen when you load Quicktime on a Windows and MacOS machine at the same time. A slow PowerPC will load Quicktime faster and run it smoother than some of the fastest x86 machines. This is mostly because of the supposed emulation on the lesser processors.
Now imagine porting it to Linux. A whole new port of the toolbox will have to be undertaken. This would be a lot of work for a group of people Apple could probably care less about. It probably requires a lot of work to port and trim the toolbox, and a whole new API to have to port to would not be well received.
Unless Linux becomes very mainstream, Apple will most likely not port to it. Apple has never released an embedded Quicktime as far as I know, and probably never will.
they should work on opensourcing all those plugins
Doing this requires strategy a little smarter than the kicking, screaming and sulking that most Open Source advocates mandate. For example:
"We don't want that software its not open source..."
compared that my five year old nephew...
"I don't want a burger, I want McDonalds!"
~^~~^~^^~~^
I'm sure you can provide some lawsuit, or other legal maneuver to show precidence to your claim. Otherwise your basing it on conjecture and it doesn't add up.
But like I said here or somewhere else, the most informative piece of information I ever learned on slashdot was from a small post about a year and a half ago. GPL != freedom, its guild socialism. BSD does mean more freedom to do what I want with code but I don't think it makes better software.
As Mr Katz, others on slashdot and many of my libertarian counterparts) fail to understand is that freedom does not mean you can do anything you want. Freedom means more and usualy comes as a direct byproduct of adherance to laws rather than the attempt to ignore them or make them go away.
Example is that you do have the freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road, but you don't have the freedom to say your chevy sprint won't be turned into a pancake by the oncoming semi. Only staying on the right side of the road (while everyone else does also) gives you the freedom to arrive safely at your destination. Restraint here means freedom.
Its not trading one freedom for another either. Freedom only has an accumulative effect. To continue the analogy, some would argue that my example is trading the freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road for the freedom to arrive safely. I say this is obviously false since even after you arrive you have the freedom to be stupid and die. However the person who already was stupid and die doesn't have the freedom to do it again.
~^~~^~^^~~^
hawk
I suppose it depends on what your definition of "works fo fucking well" is. Usually when I see that sort of statement, I automatically assume it's sarcasm, because I've had such horrible luck with IE in the past and in recent history. If you weren't intending to be sarcastic, my apologies.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Then again, you got the score of 5 for the "look, it's bad for Linux 'coz it lets you use non-Open-Source software on Linux." I suppose you refuse to play Quake 3 Arena on Linux, too. And you never used Netscape 4.x. And never used StarOffice to deal with Office documents. Never used aviplay to play DivX
One of the big complaints about Linux (and other free OSs) is the lack of commercial software. "Uh, we don't have the Sorenson codec for QuickTime, but Ogg Tarkin is gonna be l33t." Sure. So how is it I convert those Sorenson QuickTime files to Ogg Tarkin again? And how do I do it using 100% Open Source software? Oh, I don't because I'd have to use non-Free software and that's bad for Linux, eh? Sure. Whatever.
I see it as a good sign. People have an interest in seeing software "ported" to Linux. Means that there's an interest in marginalizing Windows. It's a first step. And frankly, I never understood why people had such a fit over WINE. Sure, there's a risk that developers won't port code over, and sure using binary drivers means you're stuck with x86 only. But WINE isn't just a binary abstraction layer; it's also winelib, a nice porting tool. Heck, if IE were ever to come over to Linux, what, you think Microsoft would pay people to remove all the Win32 API references and port it to, say, GTK+? LOL. How do you think IE was ported to Solaris?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
The bigger question is whether or not this implementation will use XVideo. SHM is just too slow and CPU intensive. This questions means the difference between whether these plugins seem like bulky and awkward processes run on top of an emulator, or whether they perform as well as in Windows itself.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This topic has been discussed at length on Slashdot in the past. One notable thread reads,
I wouldn't hold my breath, embedded Linux or not. From the massive PR that Apple lavishes on QT to watching Steve Jobs soil himself yearly at Macworld and Comdex whilst marvelling the latest and greatest QT innovations, etc., you get the sense that Apple really thinks they're sitting on the greatest thing since sliced bread here (they're not).
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
You're using IE5.5 under WINE with a bunch of WIndows 95 OSR2 DLLs in your case. I wouldn't be surprised if IE could limp along these days under clean-room WINE and no Microsoft OS DLLs too, but the way you're using it, that's not the case.
If you're going to use Windows system files to supplant the weaker parts of WINE, you're legally required to have a full license to Windows. Once you're paying for the full Windows license, isn't VMWare a better way to go? It provides a much better Windows-under-Linux environment than Windows-less WINE does even under ideal conditions. Point is, as a technology to roll out in environments where software piracy isn't an option, a tweaked WINE combined with MS's Windows DLLs isn't really a viable product.
Codeweavers is trying to build a business on selling WINE-derived products for targeted martkets. WINE is still free and will stay that way since there's no money in WINE itself. Things like VMWare do a better job of allowing people to run Windows and Linux simultaneously, and it's likely WINE will never catch up completely with whatever versions of Windows are current and thus become near-100% compatible.
WINE's commercial value is instead in the targeted use of it as a porting library or compatibility layer for specific applications, when Linux-compatibility is needed but a port to native *nix APIs is either too expensive or too far off to meet a desired street date.
They don't intend to make money selling this plugin compatibility adaptor to end-users running Linux on their desktop. While they might try to sell it--at a per-copy rolyalty--to commericial Linux distributors that target consumer desktops, that doesn't seem to be their goal here
Because this isn't going to help anyone install plugins on Linux, it's really something for companies that want to, say, sell web terminals that can play Quicktime and Shockwave, because those companies would also have to secure the rights to redistribute a repackaged version of their software (i.e. Quicktime and Showckwave players).
While an individual at home might manage to use this to run Windows Media Player, that home user doesn't have the right to run it on a system without a Windows license. Appliance vendors are unlikely to pay for Windows ME licenses solely for the right to put WMP on each Linux appliance they make, so in practice, this is really only a product for hardware vendors that want to license and distribute specific Windows browser plugins as part of their appliance.
This adaptor isn't the makings of a billion-dollar company, but there could be a nice business in this for the next few years.
At least michael you could have posted the link for Comet Cursors since you've mentioned it in the header.
IMNERHO, any post that contains a link to Comet Cursors should be nuked by the same lameness filter that catches goatsecx and comp-u-geek links.
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Do they release the enhanced portions of their code?
Are you going to do any research at all on this thread, or just continue to make an ass of yourself?
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I glanced around their homepage, and codeweavers don't even seem to be open source, as far as I can tell.
Perhaps you should have done more than glance, as should the moderators who modded you up to +5 for this uninformed opinion.
Their primary product is enhanced Wine, completely Open Source. Even this article makes it clear that they're discussing possible release of this new product under the Artistic License, which is what Perl uses. Folks may argue whether Perl's license is Free Software, but I haven't seen it argued that it ain't Open Source.
They say in their "About" page that they actively support open source.
They link to the FSF on their "links" page.
All their upcoming projects (all of them) are based on Wine, which is under the X11 license.
They're not GPL, but they're Free Software and Open Source as anybody. At this point, more so than Red Hat, for instance.
Oh, yeah; they pay people to work on Wine. They even have a web page devoted to it.
What the hell else do you want from them? Source code for the stuff they haven't written yet?
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You're just trading one form of freedom for another. Net gain: Zero.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I hope your listening CodeWeavers.
come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
This will encourage people to use proprietary browser plugins for windows, rather than developing native ones for Linux.
Isn't this already the case? Macromedia's Flash plugin (there's a free alternative, but last time I played with it it didn't seem to support anywhere near as much) and Real's Realmedia plugin are both widely used and closed. The moment Netscape supported closed-source plugins, we'd pretty much lost in that respect already.
What's more of a problem is that if companies can get away with just recommending their Windows plugin for Linux use, non-x86 users are left out in the cold.
It's EIA-485, by the way. 'RS' stands for "Recommended Standard." EIA-485, and EIA-232 for that matter, have been official standards for quite some time now...
What did IBM have to do with it? I wasn't aware that they designed it. One of the big applications was for fault-tolerant communication in automotive systems (I used to be in that industry). I have never, ever heard of a desktop, or other non-specialised computer with EIA485, including those from IBM.
Why not take a look at all of those embedded boards out there? EIA-485 is a must on those things. I can get transceiver chips from National Semiconductor, Maxim, TI, etc.
IBM did make something called GA-22-6974-0 for the 360/370, but it's not quite multidrop like 485 is. Multiple drivers can share a single line, though.
Interesting 485 tidbit, the electric part of the SCSI standard was based on 485.
Only if you do so to such an extent that your code constitutes a derivative work. I don't know how many lines of code you can hold literally in your head, but unless your memory is much better than mine, in any program of significant length the small bit I could recall would almost certainly be fair use.
The GPL does not prevent fair use. All it does is prevent you from creating a derivative work from a GPLed work without GPLing your derivative.
What constitutes a derivative work that falls outside of fair use? That is something of an open question, not just in software but all fields.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
From the massive PR that Apple lavishes on QT to watching Steve Jobs soil himself yearly at Macworld and Comdex whilst marvelling the latest and greatest QT innovations, etc., you get the sense that Apple really thinks they're sitting on the greatest thing since sliced bread here (they're not).
By holding tightly onto that Sorenson codec, Jobs is going to turn it into the Token Ring of the Video codec world. IBM has held just as tightly to many, many things; MCA, RS485, Token Ring, etc. By holding technology with a closed fist people eventually leave for a more open technology.
Linux doesn't cries for browser plug-ins. Major plug-ins (real, acrobat, flash, vrml...) are already native Linux implementations.
A major step would be to allow Linux to run Windows hardware drivers. Many people are still keeping a Windows partition because there's no Linux driver for their printer (or not photo-quality), no driver for their (win)modem, and sometimes there's no hope and no way to help because hardware specifications are (and will remain) closed.
The same thing could apply to other architectures as well. Almost every piece of hardware comes with MacOS drivers. Maybe it would be possible to code a glue in order to use them on Linux/PPC.
Yes, natives drivers will always be better. But this trick would be better than no hardware support at all.
If it is possible to code something able to run every Windows browser plug-ins, I guess the same technology can also server device drivers. So why not focus on this instead ?
{{.sig}}
At least michael you could have posted the link for Comet Cursors since you've mentioned it in the header. For those who don't know what it is, its what they've dubbed a "smart cursor" which allows you to select something in an article, highlight it, and get information on what you'd selected and with or without a hyperlink get information on it, or purchase something (if its a product)
Now for the Wine part of it, I think it's a great idea, and I also think the company would probably want to work around some of the bugs we often (or at least I do) get when visiting pages with Shockwave Flash, and other embedded technologies on a page. As for the above post claiming a degradation of Linux, I'd highly doubt it would degrade the views of Linux for simple reasons. By having more companies developing for the *Nix based market, it goes to show that contrary to anyone's beliefs (or secret wishes) Linux/BSD's aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
However I also hope this isn't just another one of those here-today-gone-tomorrow based ideas coming out of a company trying to ride the coattails of the open source market, gaining fame, then moving on (Caldera).
Want Root?
Quicktime has and will not be released for Linux.
I''m trying to work out whether that sentence is badly constucted, or you actually mean what it says - that Apple at some point in the past has released Quicktime for Linux. Methinks the former.
The second part of that questions is much more of a concern. Linux is currently either the number one or two embedded OS, and it seem to me that Apple will release Quicktime for embedded Linux the same way there's 100% functional (ie, with chapter navigation and other features we're still waiting on from the other three)DVD players for embedded Linux. Just as there is a Windows Media Server used on an embedded Linux device (somebody please post the URL). Embedded Linux is simply too great a market to ignore.
But if you have some sort of authority for that statement (i.e, a message from Apple), please respond.
...any ideology that attempts to lock me into a single "Open" vendor, namely the FSF.
Uhm, Free Software is not a Brain Washing Cult. It's founded on carefully argued reasoning and first principles. You can agree or disagree, but nobody is locking you in. Unless of course you are so weak-minded that you can't think for yourself, and your only idea of freedom is having 70 channels on the tv to choose from instead of 5. Well my friend, you are either pitiful or a troll.
Kinda like Samba? :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
OK, so there hasn't been a great deal of progress in the development of common plugins for GNU/Linux - Quicktime for example (I personally don't care about Shockwave or Flash, but it would be nice to take away another reason for people not to use Linux), but is this system not going to suggest to developers to not bother with plugins for Linux, and just knock out Windoze versions, expecting every Linux user on the planet to get this Codeweavers code?
Progress is good, but I'd still rather see a Linux version of $PLUGIN, instead of a compatiblity layer to run the Windows version.
Plugins aren't exactly the be-all-and-end-all of OS use, but it's just a thought.
I agree. I don't like the Idea of brining more and more windows emulation to linux. And this wont help to establish Linux as a Desktop OS. Because why hassle with Linux, just to use wine/... to use my win98/nt software? I rather use winNT directly.
We're talking about running Windows binaries here. Of course it'll be x86-only because that's what they were compiled for.
As for performance, a program under windows makes calls to the win32 library (.dll) files and the instructions are executed natively by an x86 processor. Under Linux, a program makes calls to the win32 library (Wine) and the instructions are executed natively on an x86 processor. Where does the wrapper come into play?
I dont know how the embedded device market breaks down, but many of the embedded linux products I've heard about are not running on X86 CPU's. Since WINE is X86 only, will the plugins be available only on X86 based devices? Does anyone have a Pentium IV in their combination cell phone/portable ballroom space heater?
It seems to me their are to many Linux users who want to see windows apps ported to Linux, and get
upset when they get Wine ports, or apps that run under emulation.
The key to beating windows is NEW ORIGINAL apps for Linux that are better than anything you can
get for windows.
That is the key to winning, apps that make your windows using friends want to switch because they
can't get those apps for windows!
I'm talking about kapital, Koffice, nautilus, everybuddy(an app my mom loves), Quanta+,
Evolution etc..
These are the apps that make your Windows using friends and relatives take sit up and take notice,
not ports of Windows apps, native or emulated, because they can already get that stuff for
Windows.
Wine is a usefull tool, and if it is used to port usefull windows apps to Linux so what, it makes no difference to the end user if a windows app has been ported to Linux native libraries, or winelib, the real stuff is are the apps you can get for Linux, that you can't get for Windows!
Codeweavers virtually is wine.. they have many full time and part time wine coders working for them, including the father and owner (and maintainer of the main wine tree) of wine, Alexandre Julliard working for them..
:-)
so there pretty cool..
on another note, i wonder if the google toolbar works
stuff
It's too early to tell if this is a good thing or not. It may even be better if itis closed source...
Remember how the KDE/Gnome wars started over the fact that one was using components not compatible with the GPL? We got desktop competition, better desktop support, and now both are on a solid open-source footing (some may disagree, but I believe this is a goal of both parties). What started to look like a loss for Linux turned into a big win.
What does this new plug-in tool mean for Linux? It's another step to kicking the Win partition off my drive, or at least uninstalling MSIE. If many people use a tool like this, plug-in makers may find a significant portion of the audience using Linux, at least through an emulator.
If the plugin is good, then others may decide using propriatary components is a bad thing, and start making GPL'd clones. It would take a while, but if it's a large enough itch, it will get scratched.
Soon, the plug-in makers are seeing that a Linux native plug-in is beating their own plug-in, see their downloads and purchases decrease, and may decide it would be a good thing to make a native plug-in...
I could be wrong, but this is just one possible path to the big vendors making Linux-specific drivers and plug-ins.
Maybe in the short term. The basic problem is that as it stands right now, many manufacturers don't think that developing for Linux would be profitable anyway which is exactly why Linux is a nich market OS (Servers and Geeks, and my parents too but that is another story). Until Linux gains much greater market share, this dynamic will hold true in the desktop arena.
Note that OSS developers will be able by the very nature of the sheer number of programmers to overcome proprietary software in most areas. Somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of developers in the US work only on inhouse applications and OSS gives great benefits there.
In the end, I think it is proprietary software which will end up in a niche role.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
he makes many good points... instead of working to make windows in linux, they should work on opensourcing all those plugins
samrolken
Shouldn't it be more like 'Windows browser plugins for Linux/x86'? I'm sure I will not be able to use those plugins on a Sun or an Alpha.
And what about performance with all the wrapper-crap? "Geez this Linux is slow. This c00lplugin(tm) runs much faster on my slower windows box." (Heh, java and flash in IE in vmware on a ppro200 are faster than Sun's JDK and flash natively under Linux. That doesn't say they would be fast, which they are not, just faster.)
Is the sorensen codec actually a part of the quicktime plugin or will the quicktime plugin only work like regular linux quicktime.
I think you've mistaken Windows CE for desktop Windows. CE is fairly customizable from a minimum 500K OS (please correct if you have the right number) to a full-blown Windows shell. The slimness of Linux comes at a price, just as the slimness of CE comes at a price. The price is in functionality. You'd be fooling yourself if you thought that a tiny Linux OS supported the same featureset as the version on your desk.
The Windows CE API is no more "fat" than any other embedded OS, though it has the possibility to become so as necessary.
If you want to talk NT embedded, that's a whole 'nother story, though.
Dancin Santa
It's all a matter of steps. Progress doesn't happen overnight, and something as large as a quiet takeover of the desktop by Linux will take quite a while. It requires small steps like this that make the platform attractive to people who may be interested in the latest idiotic flash animation (though that kung-fu one was pretty cool).
Free software does not live in a bubble, at least not in the eyes of the public. In fact, what you think of as free today may not be what will eventually be considered free 5 years from now. Perhaps it the definition is faltering now? When you say that Real and Macromedia no longer have to worry about developing for anything other than Windows, aren't you also, in essence, saying that Linux (or any OS that Codeweavers supports) is a viable choice for an OS? It seems that freedom from a single vendor is much more important than any ideology that attempts to lock me into a single "Open" vendor, namely the FSF.
Maybe it isn't Open Source, but the Codeweaver product allows greater leeway in choice of OSs. If that isn't progress towards freedom, maybe your definition needs tweaking.
Dancin Santa
...and now, to wait patiently for VB script support. Can't let Windoze hog all the good viruses.
Please stop talking this nonsense. This is a PREREQUESITE for Linux domination, just look at the market leaders today:
MS Office is the leader because it provided input AND export filters to various other Office suites in the early times.
IE is the leader because it implemented Netscape's HTML-extensions.
In fact you suggest to behave like a monopolist. But without a monopoly this is a stupid thing to do, barriers only hurt the smaller competitors and help the leader, and Linux is not yet the leader on the desktop.
In 2 years Linux will be the only OS that will be able to run DOS, Win16 and Win9x, WinNT and WinXP applications - and this will be a Windows-killer.
The Wine project is the second most important open-source project out there (after KDE).
Roland
Kind of ironic that a pro OSS company is using one of Microsoft's most effective strategies (embrace and adopt... I think) against them.
:)
It's about time they got a taste of their own medicine
...
string* plamenessFilter =
*plamenessFilter = "Flaming Death!!";
While it's it may seem like a win for Linux, this is definitely a loss for free software. This will encourage people to use proprietary browser plugins for windows, rather than developing native ones for Linux. This sort of thing will end up restricting Linux to a secondary, niche market, which is just where MS wants it.
I glanced around their homepage, and codeweavers don't even seem to be open source, as far as I can tell. Their mission statement is a perfect piece of corporate doublethink, which might be more plainly interpreted as: "To free Macromedia and Real Networks from the hassle of ever having to support anything except windows ever again."
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
What the Codeweavers had done is definitely a brave step. Trying to bring Winfows API to linux users isn't a small task. And they have succeeded to a fair degree.
But still a proper business model is yet to emerge for the open software. Linux is gaining ground in embedded system market, but is the company aware of the difficulties in finding market for windows applications in linux platform? Definitely the linux platform might have been chosen by a client for its own advantages over windows like thin OS, customizable code etc. By bringing a fat windows API into embedded linux market, is the company towing a right strategy?