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Cedega Being Replaced By GameTree Linux
An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming Cedega, the software forked from Wine that allows running Windows games under Linux, is being discontinued and replaced by GameTree Linux. This new software is also free. From the new website: 'TransGaming is pleased to announce the continued development of Cedega Technology under the GameTree Developer Program. This repositioning of the technology that powered the Cedega Gaming Service will allow the entire Linux community to gain free access going forward. Cedega is a cross-platform enablement technology that allows for Windows-native games to be executed on both the Linux desktop and embedded Linux platforms.'"
I wonder if they're going to attempt to incorporate Wine code (assuming that licensing is made compatible)? The most recent versions of Wine are honestly just *better* at playing Windows games than Cedega is! Cedega had some advantages - convenience and commercial backing (CodeWeavers, the backing for Wine, usually seemed more interested in business apps). However, if you were willing to use Wine, you could actually game a lot better on it than on Cedega.
I'm reminded of EVE Online. They released a Linux version of their client, which was just a Windows version wrapped in Cedega. It was an immense download, and while it worked, the advanced graphics options were disabled - Cedega didn't support them. Most of us just continued using Wine, which aside from a few glitches and a more complicated setup was better in almost every way. CCP (makers of EVE) eventually discontinued the Linux client, saying that the game ran so well on Wine that there was no reason to pay Cedega for their version (the client was free to players; presumeably CCP was eating the cost of the Cedega license). At the time of discontinuation, Cedega still didn't support the advanced graphics options, but Wine did - and the glitches were all but gone.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
TransGaming did some really nasty things back in the days - after all, it was so bad that the WINE devs decided the best thing to do was relicense WINE from BSD to LGPL. While TransGaming is legally in the right since they forked the code prior to the license switch, what they did still doesn't sit well.
Why support them when you can support the WINE guys by buying CodeWeaver's Crossover product? At least CodeWeavers directly supports WINE, and all the patches CodeWeavers make to support new games and apps make it back into WINE for everyone to enjoy?
Even the WINE guys recommend CodeWeavers.
Just a reminder that Cedega is not a repackaging of Wine. It's a proprietary fork, from back before Wine went GPL (which it did precisely because Cedega - then WineX - felt entitled to use Wine as a solid base, but not so keen to contribute their improvements back to the community). For this reason, they cannot port code over from Wine, and has diverged a lot from it since.
I've bought Cedega back in the day when they were superior for Linux gaming, but abandoned them when their they started to noticeably lag behind vanilla Wine in most games that I care about. I haven't been running Linux-only for several years now and don't know how things are today, but from what I heard, the gap has only widened since, to the point that Wine is better for vast majority of games.
What I also recall is that one other reason why TransGaming was very much disliked is due to their "source available but don't dare use it" license. See, they used to provide the code to most of Cedega (IIRC the various DRM bits were excluded), and you could actually fetch it from a public CVS and build it yourself to get a working product for free. However, TransGaming has stated that the source code is made available for "community improvements", and not simply for people using it to get a free if not full-featured version for themselves (that despite the license for the code making no such distinctions!), and that, if source code access would be abused, they'd remove it completely. They especially hated how the various source-based distros (such as Gentoo) provided automated fetch-and-build scripts allowing users to get Cedega for free with a single invocation of the package manager. Given how the product itself was largely based on a community-developed, FOSS code base, it was seen as a particularly offensive slap in the face, more so than if the code was just closed.