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Codeweavers Releases Crossover Office
rleyton writes "Codeweavers have just announced Crossover Office, a Wine derivitive which allows MS-Office 97 & 2000 products as well as Lotus Notes to run without a Windows OS License. If it's as cool as the Crossover plugin product, then it could mean a significant step forward in Wine's progress." NewsForge got hold of a final beta copy a couple of days ago and has a Crossover Office review up already, and DesktopLinux.com has one too. This looks pretty cool, yes.
Now if a PHB tells you can't run Linux, because you need Office - tell him you'll save money by not needing a Windows license, and call still use Office.
> all that needs to be done is support an API that is now almost 7 years old
This is absolutely false. The very act of installing Office 2000 on Win95 extends the Win32 API. When you install, you not only get Windows Installer added to the system, you also get updated version of DLL's installed under your WINDOWS directory.
What kind of Application installs OS updates without informing the user or giving you a choice?
Perhaps you never noticed why mouse scroll wheels started working in all sorts of dialogs and whatnot even if you never installed Intellimouse? The answer is that Microsoft applications routinely extend the OS and API.
Lastly, the WINE team has never said their target is to emulate the Original Win95 API. Even if they had done that, they would be dependant on the new DLL files, the same as Win95 is today.