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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."
Aclerex? Why have they named it as if it werea cream for clearing up acne?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Last I heard, they still hadn't kept their promise to give back to wine stuff they did...
Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?
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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?
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.
Seems like there are already plenty of adequate ways to run Windowz apps under Linux. Just none of them are free software! Will the vanilla Wine ever catch up?
My bicyles
Are they allowed to do that when the majority of their code they didn't even write? They have been making it harder and harder to get WineX code too. First they removed it from debian and then Gentoo, and I haven't been able to get the source from CVS since then. I'm not sure what license wine was using when they forked but I dont think that this is allowed, is it?
Why does every new company or product have to invent a new word? "Aclerex"? What was so wrong with "Wine Ecks and Sons, Est. 1832, Purveyors of Fine Software and Noted Not-Emulators"?
Just to save everyone lots of comments... ;-)
:-)
WINE is bad because it will discourage people from writing native applications. Native applications are important because they provide a reason for people to use GNU/Linux or *BSD wholesale, rather than flit between a Free OS and Windows. They also mean more innovation and more investment in Free Software, and more Free Software available. Will The GIMP just drop off the map once Photoshop is reliably supported? Will we no longer see native ports of games, with companies instead hoping that WINE(X) will, at some point, work well with other platforms? Maybe WINE will stop many companies from looking seriously as developing applications as cross-platform from the start, which will hurt users of other platforms like MacOSX, old MacOS, maybe GNU/Hurd, BSDs, etc.
or...
WINE is good because it will fill the application gap until Free Software can catch up. Rather than wait a few years for all the weird and wonderful applications we don't have to appear, WINE will let corporate and home users make the switch straight away and slowly migrate from Windows. WINE will encourage gamers. WINE with winelib will make cross-platform development a sinch in years to come.
Now.... discuss
It won't be long before Microsoft sues them over the name similarity...
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
For some reason, my brain keeps wanting to make this name into some variant of "Accel-".... as in Accelerex. At least then the name is a sort of verb... but "AclereX" sounds like some sort of weird drug. I mean, ACK-luhr-ex? With a capital X? I don't get it. Why must open-source products be plagued by such terrible marketing?
Oh, and on their front page, they've titled it "Enterprise Migrationware." Please, for the love of God, hire a marketing staff. This sounds like a bunch of geeks getting together and saying "What would PHBs like? Oh, I know, let's make a new buzzword! How about 'enterprise migrationware'? Because, see, it has 'enterprise' in it... and we've added 'ware' to the end..."
No. Please do not name your product with the dot-com bullsh*t generator; it's not supposed to be used in the place of a marketing team. Take this one back to the drawing board.
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Old WINE and new bottles. Nothing to see here, move along folks.
CodeWeavers: nice folks with a strong customer service orientation. They produce a product that is generally quite reliable, they'll give your money back if it won't do what it's supposed to, and they have a decent support system.
Transgaming: MIA, zero customer service orientation. The product worked for one of the fifteen games I tried with it, the support forum is very difficult to use, and the emails I sent trying to find a human went unanswered.
I'm sure that some people have had opposite experiences, but after my attempts to deal with these two companies I have no interest in giving money to Transgaming. I'd buy a Crossover Games though.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
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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...
Please help metamoderate.
...the latest designer drug name
Warning: Women who might be pregnant should not take Aclerex, or handle broken tablets...
Much of what Transgaming is selling is proprietary. Perhaps legitimately so (like the copy protection support...)- but it is still closed source all the same. In some areas, they're ahead of WINE, in others, they're behind.
Keep these things in mind when you think about all of this, though...
They were going to only go after the stuff that wasn't getting active ports and actually encourage native porting work. They turned around and came up with that bastardized "port" of The Sims and Kohan- which had issues out of the box in both cases. The Sims WAS going to be a native app and Kohan WAS a native app that had lost the porting company (Timegate got the rights to the Loki port, but they didn't want to wait and find out it's fate- they went with Transgaming.).
They were going to only work at making Linux gaming possible. Now, they're making game "ports" for Windows and MacOS of console games, but NO Linux versions of the same.
Would YOU trust this bunch?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
WineX was forked from WINE before WINE was GPLed. If I remember right, WINE was origionally under the BSD lisence.
#include "sig.h"
can they do this?
Yes. They can. The GPL requires that the source be made available either with the binaries, or as a separate download if requested by a possessor of the binaries.
So you can go buy it, and then you're entitled to the source code after you do.
On the other hand, the fork that Transgaming has was based on the BSD license, not the GPL (Wine changed licenses some time ago), so they can do whatever they want at that point, because their source code isn't bound by the GPL anyway.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Quite honestly, I've tried OpenOffice on my 800Mhz 64-MB PC, and it is so slooow, that I uninstalled it.
Koffice is faster, but crashes regularly. I understand, I'm using the older KDE (2.x), because I'm on Debian/Woody; but I had installed KDE 3.0 before, along with it's KOffice, and I was still getting crashes.
So there is no version of Office for Windows that I am aware of that works well. As long as that is the case, WINE is good for OSS, not bad. That is, if they can get Office working successfully. I tried WINE with Word98, and it sucked. But maybe WineX doesn't. If it doesn't, then I'm all in favor of WineX, closed source or not. After all, the Windows apps are also closed source; we're talking about migrating slowly, not jumping in with both feet.
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I was pleasantly surprised with OpenOffice.Org on my Mac G3 "Wallstreet" PowerBook running Yellow Dog Linux 3.0. I don't have tons of RAM (192MB) and the proc is only 233MHz (Basically equiv. to a 466MHz PII) but it ran acceptably.
I haven't played with KOffice but since OpenOffice works I might not even put any Redmond crap on the PowerBook. OO.O will indeed open/save any but the most complex MS Office documents. It also blithely ignores Word/Excel Macro viruses and might even cleanse them from documents that are infected.
OpenOffice works beautifully in both x86 and PPC Linux, and is known to work in *BSD. (which is NOT dead, btw) It also runs on the X11 compatibility layer in MacOS X.
OpenOffice likes a wee bit more RAM than 64MB. However, not much more is necessary. The Windows version seems to be very happy in 256MB RAM on a 466MHz Celeron. The Linux version flies on both my 733MHz PIII with 512MB and an AthlonXP 1800+PR with 512MB RAM. Starting OO.O on my Mac PB with Yellow Dog Linux requires a bit of patience, but once it's up and running it works. Again, that's just with 192MB RAM. When I finally get 384MB in there it will be very content indeed.
A little RAM will do ya. Just get another stick. It's not very expensive. And it will make a world of difference.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I have paid transgaming for about a year now. I've been testing their software and seeing how they operate. Since transgaming's stance on packaging the source code of winex has come to light, I have since neglected my subscription.
I was able to play, in 1 years time, WarCraft 3 on 1 particular version of WineX. I don't recall which one, but the successive version broke even that. I tested all the games they purported to support. I have alot of games.
Their forums are forums.. nothing spectacular. They have maybe 2 guys from Transgaming reading and helping users on the forums. They do not consistently respond to email. And if they do, again, it's from the guys in the forums... reminding me of a Chinese Firedrill.
I have since decided to let my sub lapse due to the environment described above. They act as if they own this code, and their license is NOT the LGPL like wine. It reminds me alot of an artificial patent. They hold on to your code for a couple of years, while they give nothing back and try to sell it. Standing on the shoulders of others and congratulating yourself on being the first to get there is no accomplishment in my eyes. But that's just my opinion, and you know what opinions are like. Anyway, It's like this:
"The source code to TransGaming WineX (minus copy protection related code, for now) is available through VA Linux's SourceForge website. You can examine and modify it to your heart's content, you can watch the changes we make as we go, and you can participate in detailed development discussions on our mailing list. The only thing you can't do is redistribute WineX code for any commercial purpose. The WineX code is licensed under the Aladdin Free Public License, which prohibits commercial use of our work. If you wish to use WineX commercially, please contact our sales team to arrange for alternative licensing arrangements.
Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com. Until then, we will periodically submit selected portions of our code for integration with the Wine project."
Essentially, we ain't gonna see shit. And with their smacking Debian and Gentoo on the head for packaging the code, they aren't following their own rules. Commercial enterprises are for profit. Debian is non-profit. Gentoo, I didn't even know was a org.. but you get the point.
If they are this rambunctious now and giving nothing in return- what happens if business picks up. Just my observation. My gut instinct is to say fuckem. And my gut is usually right.
This seems like a good idea to me. There is bound to be a market for quick, specialized, porting services to Linux. A lot of companies are looking at moving to Linux on at least some of their desktops but in many cases there are one or two in-house or 3rd party niche software products that will prevent migration from happening. For in-house products, it might not make financial sense to rewrite the program. And smaller niche software houses often don't have the time or the Linux market size for their products to justify a "proper" port.
Enter a firm like Aclerex who comes along and says "we can port this for x dollars", suddenly a lot of migration plans fall into place.
Of course this all depends on the cost and effectiveness of the folks at Aclerex.
Your story that Wine changed from LGPL to GPL is bogus. Wine is under the LGPL license today (see here). And the LGPL license is all that is needed to prevent people from "taking without giving back".
Putting Wine under the GPL would make it seriously less useful because one of the main purposes of Wine is to let people move commercial Windows applications to Linux, and that may involve linking with it.
In fact, in my opinion, CodeWeavers may even be working with Microsoft.
.Net version of Office.
CodeWeavers' most promoted product is Crossover Office, which allows MS Office to run on Linux.
Does this help Linux and hurt Microsoft? No . . . quite the opposite, in fact. Microsoft wants Linux users running MS Office, because that keeps them locked in to Microsoft file formats while Microsoft prepares the
On the Xandros home page, the main heading states:
> Xandros Desktop now runs Microsoft Office XP
On the SuSE Linux Desktop page, one of the major benefits listed is:
> Codeweaver Crossover Office for the integration of MS Office
Notice how they don't say "for running Lotus Notes," or "for running Windows applications." They only talk about MS Office.
How did CodeWeavers manage to get Office working correctly when so many others had failed? How did they work out Microsoft's secret/obfuscated calls? Did they get help?
Or if they hacked the calls, why hasn't Microsoft sued CodeWeavers under the DMCA (or the "only run with Windows" clause in the licenses)? After all, Microsoft sued another company who made it possible to run MS FoxPro on Linux.
What argument did CodeWeavers use to convince people to LGPL the Wine source? They used the envy-based "we don't want others to profit from our work" argument. Have you ever heard a real Open Source developer say that? I haven't. Open Source developers may talk about how the GPL protects the source from companies like Microsoft, but part of the reason for Open Sourcing your software is the hope that others might profit from it.
Where have I heard the envy-based "surely you don't want others profitting from your work" argument? It was a common refrain by Microsoft astroturfers, who were trying to convince us that the Open Source development model will fail.
Was there a danger in using a BSD license for Wine? Not really. Since the purpose of Wine is to allow closed source applications to run on Linux, it matters little if those applications include some extra code from Wine.
What was the main result of changing the Wine license to LGPL? It hurt Linux! Here's how...
The biggest area where Linux is lacking applications is not office software. It's games! And when the Wine license was changed to LGPL, it prevented most Windows games developers from using it! Unlike Office software, for speed and other reasons, games need to include some library code, not just link to it.
What do you think the fuss was about? Why do you think many game manufacturers are working with Transgaming, instead of using the LGPL'd version of Wine? Now you know, and I thank Transgaming for their part in protecting the BSD'd version of Wine.
So, to summarize, CodeWeaver's involvement in Wine has:
1) Made them money.
2) Helped Microsoft create an MS Office lock-in on Linux.
3) Hurt Linux by making it harder to port games.