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

Aclerex

[gowen]

Aclerex? Why have they named it as if it werea cream for clearing up acne?

Re:Aclerex

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting the audience here...

huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, they still hadn't kept their promise to give back to wine stuff they did...

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?

Re:Speed up Wine development? Are you sure?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

pressure people releasing their software under a free license

Then it sounds like the Wine project was not 100% comfortable with the BSD license in the first place.

If you license BSD, you should accept that people may take your code and close it. That's what the truly free software is about.

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.

[HermanAB]

There are many reasons to use wine. In a business case for instance, a company may have all applications for Linux, except for one or two tax or payrol related thing. In cases like that, wine is a good tool to facilitate migration to Linux.

Re:I don't understand.

[AvantLegion]

>> Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux?

No. Tiny market share prevents/slows development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux.

Re:I don't understand.

[nmos]

Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively?

Lets say we have 2 users, A & B and both would like to move to an Open Source operating system such as Linux however:

A: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is able to run it perfectly under Wine so they they switch to Linux and open source for everything but that 1 app. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Linux support and are investigating open source applications.

B: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is NOT able to run under Wine so they they keep using Windows. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Windows support and are ignoring open source applications because they have no experience with them.

Which one of these users do you think is adding to the demand for OSS software in general and Linux in particular?

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).

Modern company names

[random_rabbit]

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"?

Re:OEM emulation layer?

[robson]

Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?

Here's the main blurb from their site:

AclereX is the industry leader in cross-platform portability enabling Windows applications to run on the Linux desktop. If your organization is considering a move to the Linux desktop, AclereX can provide seamless and transparent support for your enterprise applications.

Sounds decent enough. "If your business is sick of Windows but dependent upon Windows-only applications, we can make those applications run in Linux."

Aclerex?

[SlashChick]

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.

Re:GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wine source did allow it. The fork was caused by the WINE core group choosing to switch to a GPL license--something TransGaming couldn't allow. The BSD-licensed WINE is still maintained, called ReWind. Some new WINE patches are dual licensed so they get put in here, but the gap is growing. TransGaming occasionally syncs against ReWind and allows WINE to pull anything they want out of it (it is BSD licensed, so you can relicense it under GPL if you like).

The packages pulled from Debian and Gentoo is an interesting issue. Basically, Debian and Gentoo are allowedto create packages by the license, but if they do so, TrangGaming will stop contributing to the ReWind project, so everyone loses. It's a tight balance and they've been accused of licensing their code (to ReWind) on a license they don't really mean.

But technically, so far, they're in the clear. The ReWind tree is missing some of the more interesting TransGaming bits--SafeDisc support, for example--which they're afraid of releasing because the US might do to them what they did to Sklyarov next time they have a booth anywhere in the US.

It's got to be said -

[(void*)]

Old WINE and new bottles. Nothing to see here, move along folks.

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...

Sounds like...

[Saberwind]

...the latest designer drug name

Warning: Women who might be pregnant should not take Aclerex, or handle broken tablets...

You're plugging a closed source product...

[Svartalf]

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?

Re:Until you have a work Office, I'd say no

[ErikZ]

Here's 50$ kid, go get yourself 512MB of RAM.