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

Which Kind of Ripoff?

[mfh]

Could this project be based on the leaked MS code, or is it really a CrossOver Office ripoff? I can't tell, but Mike McCormack could.

Re:Which Kind of Ripoff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unless you add some words, at least one containing an x, since the setence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" contains all 26 letters of the alphabet.

Re:Which Kind of Ripoff?

[gmhowell]

The quick versatile penguin jumped over the broken windows.

You didn't use x, y, or z for starters.

Re:Which Kind of Ripoff?

[MadChicken]

My two more efficient favorites:

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Pitch for venture capital

[evil_one666]

the specops website is a pretty blatant pitch for venture capital, and not intended to give information to end users. Has an definate air of dodginess...

true

[nycsubway]

It may be a ripoff, but where can I download it? I'd like to see the source code. If I can install Pagemaker 7 in linux, I will be very happy.

What I find odd from the screenshots...

[Henk Poley]

...is that the directories seen in the homedir view changed quite remarkably. The installation directories (sources, specops) are not there, and some wine-20040408 dir shows up in Konqueror. Just as if it is a totaly different user or something.

Ah well, 'even if' this is a fake, but at least it put some attention on Wine (and derivatives) in the sense that 'they can run Microsoft Office for ages already'.

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

[polyp2000]

I would have looked into a way to make this windows apps draw the controls with the linux gui theme.

I wonder just how difficult that would be. A good chunk of the controls are basically pixmaps there would be some constraints as to dimensions and possibly palette issues. But since we have a partially complete native implemetation of the windows API in wine I cant imagine that it would be that much of a mammoth task to intercept API calls and/or use an alternative pixmaps. The wine project are probably more concerned about achieving compatibility at the moment than anything else. None the less I wouldnt mind seeing something along these lines also.

nick...

The name "David" - Biblical reference?

[CdBee]

David is known to many as the Biblical character to slew Goliath, putting the Philistines into retreat and making David a favourite of the Hebrew people, who would one day be their king.

Following this, David was repeatedly attacked by the leaders of the Hebrew people for being too strong.

"For a while, David found himself in the rather bizarre situation of fighting Saul's enemies and fleeing Saul at the same time." - quoted from keyway.ca

No, I'm no sort of religious propagandist, it's just amusing how well this rings when read as an analysis of commercial software vendors targeting the OSS community.