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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."
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.
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}}
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.
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