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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."
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.
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.
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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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}}
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.
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 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
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?