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Jeremy White And Mad Penguin On CrossOver Office 3

Posted by timothy on from the horsie's-mouth dept.

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."

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wine by j0hndoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2 by arvindn · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  3. Re:do we still need it? by Rignes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think there is a nitch for Crossover. While many Linux home users don't feel the need to run Windows applicaitons anymore, there are plenty of businesses that feel they need to run MS Office (some even have it as a requirement to do business with others). I think Crossover is a great way to offer a stepping stone for businesses. As in, they can ditch the expensive Windows Operating systems and change to Linux while their users can still use the applications they already know.

    In my mind it gives a middle ground step between being 100% Microsoft and changing to 100% Linux/OSS. As in, individual users are very dynamic and can change all their stuff at once if they so choose. Must businesses take things slower and think about making such drastic changes.

    Crossover just gives them a stepping stone that breaks a big change into smaller, easier to swallow, chunks. Also, it breaks up the learning curve, it gives users a chance to learn Linux first, then to learn an Office alternative if they so choose.

    Brian