New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex

Shisha writes "Linux Planet is running a story about a new Wine offspring. Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too. So why not try to sell it? For marketing reasons they're selling it to corporations under the AclereX name. Their website has a datasheet with more details about what they are actually offering. Unlike CodeWeavers, they don't seem to be targeting individuals at all, they'd rather sell to corporations. So no downloads available, sorry. Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good. Wine Weekly News discusses some of the reactions of the original Wine authors."

Comments

Speed up Wine development? Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Transgaming took Wine code before the LPGL change, and haven't gone back.

Do they still contribute to the mainline WINE effort? Has ANY of their code made it back?

or are we just plugging a closed-source commercial product here?

I don't understand.

[Alethes]

Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux? Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively? As long as people can comfortably run MS Office in Linux, doesn't that mean they won't bother learning OpenOffice.org? As long as users can run Windows games in WINE, what will encourage game vendors to create native versions of their applications? I could understand if this were a system being used to facilitate migration to open-source solutions, but it seems that quite the opposite is true.

Give me a clue if I need one.

Re:I don't understand.

[dcuny]

There's also Mono, the Open Source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework.

The original idea was to implement the Windows.Forms library with some native toolkit. But since it's so dependant on the Microsoft windows model, it turned out they would pretty much have to write it from scratch - or use Wine.

There's also React OS, an Open Source implementation of Windows NT. They've spent most of their effort over the last couple years working on the core functionality. Now that most of the core is working, they can use Wine libraries as the basis of much of the higher level functionality, instead of writing it from scratch.

Hrm... the ReactOS site seems to be offline at the moment. From the Google cache of the announcement of stuff due at the end of Augusy:

• Amongst other features and fixes, this release will include a greatly improved win32k.sys (better, windowing, keyboard support, more routines completed overall), the beginning of an explorer.exe, more controls ported from WINE for user32 (menus, messageboxes and dialogs), greatly improved performance for the standard VGA driver and further work on the NDIS driver.

More options are better. An Open Source version of NT is certainly a Good Thing(tm).

Speeding up development how?

[SuperBanana]

Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good.

Or it could hopelessly fragment Wine even further. I've run the commercial version of Wine, and it behaved completely differently from the open-source version, which I found to be massively broken(impossible to get set up correctly). It --appears-- that from a useability standpoint for the end user, none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine to work better? Talk about conflict of interest...