More Light Shed on Project David

Sun writes "Flexbeta.net received from Specops Labs screenshots "proving" that project David (previously covered here) is a real thing. The demo.... Office 2000 install. This is something both Wine and CrossOver Office know how to do for quite some time. In a discussion on wine-devel some people noticed evidence inside the screenshots that project David is a CrossOver Office ripoff."

Comments

Show me something recent...

[harikiri]

Show me the latest versions of popular Windows apps (office, outlook, powerpoint) being installed and running - and I'll be more impressed.. And give a real copy to a review site to test - just not that girl over at osnews.com! ;)

At present, why would anyone use this instead of Crossover Office? Well... whenever they release it, that is.

Re:Show me something recent...

[linuxci]

Well I'm running office XP under crossover office just fine. I'm not sure if there's any later version of office out now but that works for me and is more recent than 2000.

Other things that work fine for me in crossover is MSIE 6 (well to IE's limited ability anyway), Media Player and Trillian.

However, all my needs these days are really met by Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice - so I use crossover very few times.

However if I did need to use the complex features of MS Office that are not yet in OpenOffice I'd definitely recommend Crossover

Re:Show me something recent...

[ian mills]

Office 2003 is out, and does not even install in Crossover or Wine. link

Purloined code

[Anonymous Coward]

that in the picture http://www.flexbeta.net/images/david/winbridge_ins tall.gif the second line in winbridge.lst is /etc/wine... There are more clues that this project David is just a (possibly repackaged) Wine. the second line in winbridge.lst is /etc/wine...

Re:Purloined code

[Ianoo]

Indeed, this is almost certain proof that it's WINE-derived. If you look at the list of files that are shown in winbridge.lst icon, then we have (with my guesses in brackets):

/etc/rc.d/init
/etc/wine
/usr/bin/notep[ad.exe]
/usr/bin/progm[an.exe]
/usr/bin/reged[it.exe]
/usr/bin/regsv[r32.exe]
/usr/bin/unins[tall.exe]
/usr/bin/wcmd
/usr/bin/wine
/usr/bin/wine-[???]
/usr/bin/wine-[???]

If that's not a WINE ripoff I can't imagine what else it is.

Re:Purloined code

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the list of files that are shown in winbridge.lst icon

It's embarrasingly easy to switch off the text file previews in Konqueror - are these 'David' people really that incompetent? They should at least give us a challenge... :-)

this image

[Anonymous Coward]

This image mentioned in the article clearly shows lines that reference /usr/bin/wine in the winbridge.lst preview icon.

Combined with the link you give, if this is not a complete ripoff then they are at least building on the wine base code in some way.

Re:Ow... my eyes...

[sg_oneill]

er?

gifs are lossless, and the patents expired. They are now free as in speech and jpegs are not apropriate for screencaps

pngs are cool and all, but wig out some proprietry browsers

Re:hmm

[Ianoo]

The thing is, they didn't even fake the screenshots well enough to hide the fact they've ripped off WINE and/or Crossover Office. Does that say something about their competance?

Twice wrong

[leonbrooks]

1. GIFs aren't lossless, they're limited to 8-bit indexed colour.
   
2. The patents haven't expired everywhere yet.

Better to use a technology never patented: PNG.

Re:Twice wrong

[hexene]

GIFs aren't lossless, they're limited to 8-bit indexed colour.

GIFs are lossless. The 8-bit colour restriction is an issue, but it can be used to store and retrieve an 8-bit colour image without losing any detail.

The LZW patent expired in the US on 20 June 2003, but Unisys still assert that it exists in other countries (the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Japan).

Why this might be really evil

[clusterix]

If it is just a repackaging of wine, the worst thing is the investments they claim to have received. They haven't done anything to actually help wine yet, and if that money is real, it could have been invested in one of the real wine contributing companies. These guys will probably just run away with the money in the end if they are this bad at faking things.

Crossover

[quinkin]

It's a crossover ripoff. See the wine mailing list (notes evidence of crossover bugs in the screen shots).

Q.

Re:Ow... my eyes...

[BenjyD]

Well, here's one reason to use PNG:

[bdr@arthurdent Documents]$ ls -l
total 172 -rw-rw-r-- 1 bdr bdr 97056 May 9 15:07 office_install1.gif
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bdr bdr 75041 May 9 15:07 office_install1.png

A 25% size decrease for the same quality is pretty good.

Re:Pitch for venture capital

[1u3hr]

Their market strategy page
Objectives

By the end of the first 12 months of operation:
Develop a client base of 75 White Box System Builders and 1 Major Strategic OEM
Sell and Ship 30,000+ copies of the DAVID Middleware
Generate a gross revenue of US$ 1,000,000.00

And the Contacts page gives one address only:
PHILIPPINES
Summit One Office Tower
530 Shaw Blvd.
Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila 150

Re:Which Kind of Ripoff?

[0xB00F]

...the stupid and shameless kind? :) It *is* wine. Look at the screen shots. The wine directory on the filesystem tree, the references to wine files on the lst icons... You'd think they would be smart enough to hide evidence of a rip-off since they were smart enough to change the titles on the wine windows.

These specops guys seem to be just VC phishing. The things they say on their buzzword-laden website reads investment scam all the way.

beh

[XO]

Note to self/all:

WINE cannot run the Windows Installer.

Re:Ow... my eyes...

[aWalrus]

PNG transparency (its Alpha channel) is what is not widely supported. Most browsers display non-transparent PNG's well.

Re:It looks like a ripoff of wine to me.

[arkanes]

Most (I can't conclusively say all) of the common controls are indeed drawn using primitives. You could possibly trap the theme API available in XP to redirect calls to a native theme engine, but that would be a tremendous amount of work (and might not work period).

I emailed Specops....

[TheRealJFM]

Since no one else did, I sent this when the first slashdot article appeared. I got a reply recently.

To sum up the email, they will use LGPL, and release a demo code around May when the website will be re-opened.

The program is based on some already existing open source software. So yes, it probably uses wine.

So will it turn up?

This was the response:

The availability of the commercial version of Project David is before the
end of this year. We do encourage the open source movement and we will
comply with the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. We will be posting
developments and availability of our demo code through our Website
http://www.specopslabs.com which will be reopened before the end of May.
Through our website, we will be announcing how you can secure a licensed
copy of Project David when it becomes commercially available before the end
of this year. For existing MS Windows users, it will be available via
download. For users buying a new PC, we are working with PC manufacturers,
System Whitebox Builders and OEM's on having this pre-loaded when the PC is
ordered as a Linux desktop/server

As the final pricing of the commercial version of DAVID is still being
finalized, the combined pricing of David with the Linux distribution of your
choice will be significantly lower than securing a license for the desktop
proprietary Operating Systems in the market today. We are a firm believer in
having Linux on the desktop and will price the product accordingly to make
the commercial issues more compelling.

Below are some additional information on Project David. [SNIP!]

The only things I didn't already know from the articles that have appeared are that:

"Our Linux/Win Bridge software is one of multiple
components [Including LGPL stuff like wine?], which comprise our OS platform. In the future we will release
another component, which is a set of tools that will encourage developers to
write native Linux applications."

"The David software is a joint development effort between De La Salle
University and SpecOpS Labs. Our Chief Technical Officer is Mr. Peter
Valdez. As you may know Mr. Valdez is the founder of Tivoli Systems, which
is now a multi billion-dollar flagship product of IBM."

"The code for our Windows/Linux Bridge is a hybrid of code, including our own
proprietary code, and code from several open source projects."