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

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.

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."