Jeremy White And Mad Penguin On CrossOver Office 3

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."

Comments

do we still need it?

[xlyz]

I feel less and less the need to run Windows software

Re:do we still need it?

[gmuslera]

The nice thing is not needed it, but having that alternative available. In a future something could make you need to run a windows program (for whatever, from firmware configuration to certain places idiot policy on required browsers/software/etc) and you'll prefer to have some way to run the desired software under linux that boot windows.

Re:do we still need it?

[rock_the_casbah]

You feel less and less the need to run Windows software? You obviously don't work in a business-to-business capacity. Linux and its apps (Ooo, Gimp, etc.) are fine if you're working with technical folks. But I'd say most businesses assume you will be using MS Office for pretty much everything, and if you're not, you'd better not tell them.

Re:do we still need it?

[mvdw]

I think there is a nitch for Crossover.

Here the bastardization of the english language is complete. Interesting that the word "niche" (pronounced 'neesh'), can be mis-pronounced as 'nitch' by so many people, that it will then become phonetically mis-spelled as "nitch" by someone.

What's next? "My computer has 512k of level 1 catch"?!?

Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[haX0rsaw]

I would argue that an application of this nature, is, in the long term, a bad thing for desktop Linux.. in the same way that OS/2's Win16 support actually served as a detriment to that platform...

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[arvindn]

No it won't. This has repeatedly been gone over before. The difference compared to OS/2 is the community. Do you think all of us linux zealots are going to stop writing apps if wine becomes good enough? :-)

There might be a slight tendency for commercial software vendors to not bother porting their apps to linux because of wine, but that's becoming harder and harder as linux edges closer to critical mass. And with heavyweights like IBM and Novell behind linux, I wouldn't be too worried.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[IamTheRealMike]

Can you actually show that Win16 support acted to the detriment of OS/2, or is that just an assumption you've made - "other people on Slashdot keep saying it so it must be true" ?

Actually, I've seen some pretty compelling arguments from people who used OS/2 at the time that Windows support did not harm it, and in fact probably helped - they have claimed that the main reason OS/2 failed (and of course there were many) was that IBM didn't market it well: they weren't even selling machines with it on themselves at one point.

Regardless, whether it hindered or helped OS/2 is largely academic. Application support is one of the big things currently stopping a mass migration to desktop Linux, along with inertia/lack of experience and some general immaturities in the technology. Nat Friedman of Novell has said that app compat is the number one blocker for their sales team.

So Wine really is necessary, simply because it doesn't make sense to rewrite every desktop program in the world to use the Linux APIs. To be frank, humanity has better things to do.

Disclaimer: I'm a Wine developer so am somewhat biased. But on the flip side, I wouldn't be working on Wine if I didn't think it was important.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[Spoing]

Agreed. I'm getting borred with folks draging up OS/2 when Wine is mentioned. The two aren't similar enough to draw an useful comparison.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[Ploum]

Well, with $15k, you can hire some opensource developpers and start your own image editor (by forking the Gimp).

Or, better, you hire somes developpers to work on Gimp.

Is it really more expensive to do that ?

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[neverkevin]

15k is like the 3 month salary of 1 programmer. I doubt 1 programmer can turn the Gimp into somthing usable in 3 months. Adobe has spent 15 years and millions of dollars to get photoshop where it is today, a company would have to pay more then a few k to get any program to the level of photoshop.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[CliffH]

No,

OS/2s Win16 support (and Win32 lest we forget) was not the reason that platform went by the wayside. There were a TON of reasons that went by the wayside including marketting (IBM is starting to get better at this), amount of knowledge needed to administrate OS/2 boxes (was more than Windows 3.x and 9x boxes), cost (OS/2, for the most part, cost more), and did I mention marketting? :) I was a TeamOS/2 member at one time and I tried to do my part to spread OS/2 around (got about 15 people to switch in the end) but damn IBM didn't help matters one little bit. On top of everything else, we had the lovely lovely FixPacks? Anyone remember those? Nothing like 20+ floppies, get 18 disks in, one bad floppy, start from Step 1 sort of thing.

Ok, I'm done ranting because even I see I'm not making too much sense. In short, Win16 compatibility wasn't the downfall of OS/2, IBM and OS/2 were the downfall of OS/2. Still an excellent system even today with some excellent concepts, but buried by no marketting effort. No mindshare equals no market penetration equals no apps (I know, there were a lot of shareware and a good bit of commercial stuff out) equals no mainstream users equals dead product.

CliffH

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[16K Ram Pack]

Alternatively, get Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux. I can't understand why this isn't being done (correct me if it is).

Apart from the GIMP threat, don't most major software firms have an interest in seeing Microsoft brought down a bit to prevent them being such a threat?

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[jackbird]

Photoshop hasn't really changed all that much since version 3, and many of the later features show a lack of a coherent development direction and/or buyouts of 3rd-party code (Image/Extract and Image/Liquify, for example). Photoshop feels more and more like a cash cow with each release.

Re:Wine

[j0hndoe]

Actually because Wine is LGPL, Codeweavers is forbidden to make proprietary changes to the main codebase (and they supported this change, it used to be a more liberal license). All the really do is package it up, make nice installers, provide support, same as any other "good" company based on FOSS software.

MS Office has been runnable with Wine for years, so your argument kinda goes down the drain.

Too little, too late.

[panamahank]

In looking at the list of Gold apps, and those are the only ones that matter since partial functionality sucks, I don't see a single app that I need that isn't already done well enough by Linux. It would be nice if they had fully functional Access compatibility, since one of my customers has subscribed to a service that uses an Access database, and records can only be downloaded in Access format. It really sucks to have to have a dual-boot computer just to convert those records.

access and project

[millahtime]

Access and MS Project are two programs that a lot of business use. Especially companies that do business with the military and big 3 auto manufacturers.

Where I work there needs to be open source software that can work with these files and probubally perfect functionality in wine for them.

More to the effect there needs to be an open source counterpart.

Crossover is a serious application.

[aussersterne]

I am a former "wine hater" who was never able to get it to do anything useful. It turns out that a large part of making Windows applications work properly in wine is managing the registry and which libraries will be native/non-native for each application.

This is Crossover's value-add to wine: it takes care of all of the wine details for you, so that you don't have to be a wine coder with all of the detailed Windows .DLL and registry knowledge that implies, just to make Windows applications work.

I have to use MS Office XP for my work in print media and publishing. I also need Photoshop from time to time, though with GIMP 2.0 this need is greatly reduced.

MS Office XP, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Windows Media Player all work perfectly under Crossover with Wine. I will never have to use Win4Lin or VMWare again or cope with a full Windows desktop again!

Now that I have seen wine actually work, and work brilliantly, I believe in it to a much greater degree.

Early /.ed but already a lot of troll..comments ;)

[Ploum]

I like /.

The story talk about an interview and somes others things not avalaible (because of /. effect).

But people don't feel the need to read the interview to comment it and to begin flamewar about wine-not wine, Msoffice standard or not, etc...

Funny (already more than 50 comments)

Well, moderator, I think that the next step of /. will be the empty story, not-new-news.

Simply put a subject and we can troll on it. Today : "WINE" !!! Yeah...