Yes, Wine really is coming along nicely. It's been a very long hard fight, but an amazing range of things work, and it's just going to keep getting better.
Note that Wine has a sponsor - CodeWeavers - and we have collectively dumped at least $20 Million on Wine through the years. Wine is hard.
We do all of that that $59.95 at a time, with the support of people who understand what we do and who choose to support us. I think this is amazing and powerful and wonderful, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who does support us.
I just wish more people knew the details and understood why PlayOnLinux and stock Wine work so well these days. My ducky demise will not be in vain if just one more person discovers CrossOver goodness:-).
The GPL, as many have commented, does not preclude or even discourage charging money for the software. The primary ethical thrust of the GPL is that your users must have unbridled freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software you have provided to them. You appear to have met that cleanly.
But, as a considerate human being, you've also taken the time to consider the original authors personal wishes. That's a gracious thing to do, but obviously it's now landed you in an awkward position. Candidly, I'm with you; I'm rather biased, and think that folks deserve to receive compensation for their work on Free Software. However, it's up to you to decide how far to go in satisfying their personal wishes. So, it remains an interesting ethical dilemma, but I think it has nothing to do with the GPL.
Of course, if this is all a clever marketing stunt, and you're in cahoots with the original developer to create a fake controversy,
then my hat is off to you, sir.:-).
One clarification: in my last paragraph, I implied that I was upset with people on the Wine mailing list.
That was poorly written on my part; my anger is almost entirely directed at the original poster. Max has written some nifty code. Alexandre won't take it, for
reasons that most folks are clear on. So folks are working to find ways to make that code available for folks to try. That's
all good; it in fact makes good pressure for getting it done 'right', and makes it a great tool to test the usefulness
of a DIB engine. So it's all good, and healthy, and for this to somehow be spun up the way it was really bugged me.
I find this story spin deeply offensive and highly misleading.
Let's start at the bottom, because that's the one that offends me so mightily.
My blog is pointed to, with a caption 'adverse commercial agenda'. In that
self same blog post, I refer to the energy we put into the DIB engine - I paid
Huw to work on the DIB engine for six months. In fact, CodeWeavers has
had the highly unenviable job of doing the long, hard dirty jobs that no one else
wants to do, because they're not fun. (Can you say "COM", boys and girls).
CodeWeavers contributes all of its patches to Wine first, and if you look
at the top contributors to the Wine project throughout its lifetime, you
will find a stunning number of CodeWeavers people. I find it personally insulting
to the many people at CodeWeavers that have worked so very hard on Wine,
often for very little pay, to imply that we have an evil agenda. We don't. We do
want to make a living. We do put our customers ahead of shills on mailing lists.
We do sometimes focus on making CrossOver better for specific tasks, but at all
times our core mission remains making Wine better.
The proposed 'wonder' patch is based upon solid work by Jesse Allen, along with some of the work
we paid Huw to do. And, in fact, it does some nifty things, because the author went
after the fun cool part of the task, and ignored the long, hard, nasty part of
the task. Indeed, the author repeatedly refuses to consider Alexandre's
requirements for doing it right. Max has not 'satisfied all requirements set'.
In fact, if you read
this post, you'll see that Max has no interest in implementing the DIB Engine in
the fashion that Alexandre has requested - it's too much work.
Wine has come a long way in the past 8-10 years - anyone who has used Wine lately
can tell you how amazing it is becoming. This is largely driven by the ever
increasing standard that Alexandre is using - the bar for patches, particularly against
stable and well tested code - is becoming very high. This is a Good Thing (TM).
And finally, up to the top, this phrase is troubling:
'the dissatisfaction of core developers with the arbitrary project governance'.
Once a year, the core Wine developers get together at
WineConf.
We often have a topic called 'Wine governance', where we have great fun lampooning
Alexandre. (He certainly is terse, and can be incredibly maddening). But the overwhelming
and unanimous consensus, year over year, is that he does a damn fine job and that the
Wine project is lucky to have him.
Change that to be 'the dissatisfaction of a bunch of vocal people on the mailing
list, who don't really understand the technical issues at hand, but think they're missing out
on a cool shiny' and now you have an accurate
statement.
I just posted the tips to get all of the
relevant sauce
. And, as another poster reports, it's been running fairly well with Wine for at least 9 days; it just took us a bit longer to get https working properly.
Cheers,
Jeremy
In case anyone is interested, the important parts of this work are available in a Free form, one way or the other. We're using a build of Wine equivalent to WineHQ of about mid week last week, along with a few patches that haven't been committed yet. I've
sent along a few more details to the Wine devel mailing list.
Cheers,
Jeremy
For those wondering where the latest data is: in http://test.winehq.org, click on the
"Last Modified" column twice, that will bring the latest data to the
top.
Thanks to everyone who submitted data so far! We have enough reports
for XP now, but any other version of Windows would be handy.
Be sure to run this again when wine-1.0-rc3 comes out next week.
We're the largest single contributor to Wine. We host the Wine web site, employ the Wine maintainer, and do much of the 'heavy lifting' required to keep Wine moving. Of course, many others contribute as well, so we're certainly not the sole maker, but we very much play a vital role in the making of Wine.
Well, now that Google has sponsored so much work on Wine, yes you can
just use Wine to run Picasa, and that will work very nicely.
Of course, the Picasa for Linux product is far more tailored for Linux
than that would be; it doesn't give you drive letters, it knows how to
integrate into your file system, it knows how to connect to your desktop
environment; it has a whole raft of other Linux specific features. I think
it's even reasonable to hope that as it matures, it will become even
more fully tailored to Linux.
But the bottom line is simple - try it. You may be surprised at how handy
it is. And today you have one more application on Linux than you had yesterday. I'm not sure how anyone can be upset by that.
The icon issue was fixed back before 4.2 shipped; have you
tested since then?
Updates I'm not so sure about; we just did it via the online
tool and it worked, but we haven't tested (or triaged anyway)
all the versions to make sure they all worked.
Well, we use CrossOver to run Quickbooks 2000, and versions
up through 2004 are officially supported.
However, that support is fairly new, so we don't
tend to recommend that people move all their books
solely to CrossOver; that would be crazy
(okay, so we're crazy [grin]).
And yes, the server is slow. We're working on it. The
server is up; if you wait 15-20 seconds, the pages do
come up. Just takes it a bit.
Yeah, we wanted to as well. Sadly, it needs wire compatible DCOM in order
to work properly, and we just weren't going to get that done. We decided
it was a mistake to hold up the whole release just for Outlook. We're
going to go after Outlook next and hope to have it out 'soon'.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Hmm. Our new ISP isn't doing as well as we'd have liked; our servers
are humming along at a very mild load limit, but we seem to be
throttled out of the ISP (seems like it always takes one/. post
to iron out the kinks at an ISP:-/).
For the record, we do not have any proprietary DLLs;
all Wine work we do goes back into the public Wine tree and is also published on our web site.
Further, we work hard to make sure that the applications we support do not need any DLLs from Windows. There are certain applications, like IE, which require you to have a licensed product from Microsoft, but that is the reality of their license, and not a technical limitation of CrossOver and Wine.
Finally, yes, the Plugin functionality did get merged into the Office product about a year back.
I'm really impressed by how hard Ingrid worked on this; I told
her I didn't think she get Microsoft to comment officially, and yet
she did. Way to go!
And I'm thrilled to have Microsoft say that Wine is
the "the most popular third-party translation technology
in use".
The one thing I felt she didn't emphasize enough though
was that this is not a problem for Wine - we shouldn't
(and mostly don't) need any OS component downloads
from Microsoft. In fact, we're just finishing up work
to make any need for DCOM or MSI or any other 'common
downloads' from Microsoft unnecessary.
Yup. Wine is not a permitted topic for IBM;
they had a nice Whitepaper on it get published
a while back, and the author didn't realize
that was against the rules, was slapped,
and the paper is down now.
The delicious irony of this is that they use
Wine heavily internally to run Notes.
I don't have any clear visibility into why this
is; I get a lot of hemming and hawing about it,
but no clear vision. I suspect some back room
handshake agreement with the folks in Redmond,
but have no real proof for that.
They try to raise an argument about patents,
but IBM themselves know that a proven monopolist
cannot successfully prosecute a lawsuit over
patents (which is why IBM prosecuted no such cases
from 1935 until 1985, because they got
slapped in 1935 for antitrust violations
when they did so).
A perhaps more straight forward explanation
is that using Wine greatly reduces the amount
of services that IBM can provide you with:-/.
Sorry for the confusion. There was a
[grin] in angle brackets after that,
only that seems not to go through
to HTML posts very well.
It was all meant as a jest. I think Software
Patents are an evil blight on the land.
We are only able to do the work that we do
because of the money we receive from our
customers, most of whom are single end
users.
All of our work on Wine goes back to the
public Wine tree. I think its fair to say
that Wine runs MS Office 2000, XP,
Photoshop, and a wide range of applications
only because of the money our customers have sent
us. So, yes, I think it makes a huge difference,
and we greatly appreciate it.
Further, there is one misconception I
wish to correct. We've actually changed our
development process recently so that all
of our Wine work goes to the public
Wine tree as soon as our developer makes the change, without regard to CrossOver releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Wine really is coming along nicely. It's been a very long hard fight, but an amazing range of things work, and it's just going to keep getting better.
Note that Wine has a sponsor - CodeWeavers - and we have collectively dumped at least $20 Million on Wine through the years. Wine is hard.
We do all of that that $59.95 at a time, with the support of people who understand what we do and who choose to support us. I think this is amazing and powerful and wonderful, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who does support us.
I just wish more people knew the details and understood why PlayOnLinux and stock Wine work so well these days. My ducky demise will not be in vain if just one more person discovers CrossOver goodness :-).
Cheers,
Jeremy
The GPL, as many have commented, does not preclude or even discourage charging money for the software. The primary ethical thrust of the GPL is that your users must have unbridled freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software you have provided to them. You appear to have met that cleanly.
But, as a considerate human being, you've also taken the time to consider the original authors personal wishes. That's a gracious thing to do, but obviously it's now landed you in an awkward position. Candidly, I'm with you; I'm rather biased, and think that folks deserve to receive compensation for their work on Free Software. However, it's up to you to decide how far to go in satisfying their personal wishes. So, it remains an interesting ethical dilemma, but I think it has nothing to do with the GPL.
Of course, if this is all a clever marketing stunt, and you're in cahoots with the original developer to create a fake controversy, then my hat is off to you, sir. :-).
Cheers,
Jeremy
One clarification: in my last paragraph, I implied that I was upset with people on the Wine mailing list. That was poorly written on my part; my anger is almost entirely directed at the original poster. Max has written some nifty code. Alexandre won't take it, for reasons that most folks are clear on. So folks are working to find ways to make that code available for folks to try. That's all good; it in fact makes good pressure for getting it done 'right', and makes it a great tool to test the usefulness of a DIB engine. So it's all good, and healthy, and for this to somehow be spun up the way it was really bugged me.
Cheers,
Jeremy
I find this story spin deeply offensive and highly misleading.
Let's start at the bottom, because that's the one that offends me so mightily. My blog is pointed to, with a caption 'adverse commercial agenda'. In that self same blog post, I refer to the energy we put into the DIB engine - I paid Huw to work on the DIB engine for six months. In fact, CodeWeavers has had the highly unenviable job of doing the long, hard dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, because they're not fun. (Can you say "COM", boys and girls). CodeWeavers contributes all of its patches to Wine first, and if you look at the top contributors to the Wine project throughout its lifetime, you will find a stunning number of CodeWeavers people. I find it personally insulting to the many people at CodeWeavers that have worked so very hard on Wine, often for very little pay, to imply that we have an evil agenda. We don't. We do want to make a living. We do put our customers ahead of shills on mailing lists. We do sometimes focus on making CrossOver better for specific tasks, but at all times our core mission remains making Wine better.
The proposed 'wonder' patch is based upon solid work by Jesse Allen, along with some of the work we paid Huw to do. And, in fact, it does some nifty things, because the author went after the fun cool part of the task, and ignored the long, hard, nasty part of the task. Indeed, the author repeatedly refuses to consider Alexandre's requirements for doing it right. Max has not 'satisfied all requirements set'. In fact, if you read this post, you'll see that Max has no interest in implementing the DIB Engine in the fashion that Alexandre has requested - it's too much work.
Wine has come a long way in the past 8-10 years - anyone who has used Wine lately can tell you how amazing it is becoming. This is largely driven by the ever increasing standard that Alexandre is using - the bar for patches, particularly against stable and well tested code - is becoming very high. This is a Good Thing (TM).
And finally, up to the top, this phrase is troubling: 'the dissatisfaction of core developers with the arbitrary project governance'. Once a year, the core Wine developers get together at WineConf. We often have a topic called 'Wine governance', where we have great fun lampooning Alexandre. (He certainly is terse, and can be incredibly maddening). But the overwhelming and unanimous consensus, year over year, is that he does a damn fine job and that the Wine project is lucky to have him.
Change that to be 'the dissatisfaction of a bunch of vocal people on the mailing list, who don't really understand the technical issues at hand, but think they're missing out on a cool shiny' and now you have an accurate statement.
Cheers,
Jeremy
I just posted the tips to get all of the relevant sauce . And, as another poster reports, it's been running fairly well with Wine for at least 9 days; it just took us a bit longer to get https working properly.
Cheers,
Jeremy
In case anyone is interested, the important parts of this work are available in a Free form, one way or the other. We're using a build of Wine equivalent to WineHQ of about mid week last week, along with a few patches that haven't been committed yet. I've sent along a few more details to the Wine devel mailing list.
Cheers,
Jeremy
http://wiki.winehq.org/MakeTestFailures
and
http://wiki.winehq.org/ConformanceTests
For those wondering where the latest data is: in http://test.winehq.org, click on the "Last Modified" column twice, that will bring the latest data to the top.
Thanks to everyone who submitted data so far! We have enough reports for XP now, but any other version of Windows would be handy.
Be sure to run this again when wine-1.0-rc3 comes out next week.
Cheers,
Jeremy
We're the largest single contributor to Wine. We host the Wine web
site, employ the Wine maintainer, and do much of the 'heavy lifting'
required to keep Wine moving. Of course, many others contribute as well,
so we're certainly not the sole maker, but we very much play a vital
role in the making of Wine.
It runs completely separate from other versions of Wine.
Of course, the Picasa for Linux product is far more tailored for Linux than that would be; it doesn't give you drive letters, it knows how to integrate into your file system, it knows how to connect to your desktop environment; it has a whole raft of other Linux specific features. I think it's even reasonable to hope that as it matures, it will become even more fully tailored to Linux.
But the bottom line is simple - try it. You may be surprised at how handy it is. And today you have one more application on Linux than you had yesterday. I'm not sure how anyone can be upset by that.
Cheers,
Jeremy
There was a broken kernel in the Dapper release cycle. You may find that if you upgrade your kernel package that you'll get more joy.
...is on Newsforge.
Updates I'm not so sure about; we just did it via the online tool and it worked, but we haven't tested (or triaged anyway) all the versions to make sure they all worked.
Cheers,
Jeremy
However, that support is fairly new, so we don't tend to recommend that people move all their books solely to CrossOver; that would be crazy (okay, so we're crazy [grin]).
And yes, the server is slow. We're working on it. The server is up; if you wait 15-20 seconds, the pages do come up. Just takes it a bit.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Yeah, we wanted to as well. Sadly, it needs wire compatible DCOM in order to work properly, and we just weren't going to get that done. We decided it was a mistake to hold up the whole release just for Outlook. We're going to go after Outlook next and hope to have it out 'soon'. Cheers, Jeremy
So, here's a direct link to the demo torrent.
Enjoy!
Further, we work hard to make sure that the applications we support do not need any DLLs from Windows. There are certain applications, like IE, which require you to have a licensed product from Microsoft, but that is the reality of their license, and not a technical limitation of CrossOver and Wine.
Finally, yes, the Plugin functionality did get merged into the Office product about a year back.
Cheers,
Jeremy
And I'm thrilled to have Microsoft say that Wine is the "the most popular third-party translation technology in use".
The one thing I felt she didn't emphasize enough though was that this is not a problem for Wine - we shouldn't (and mostly don't) need any OS component downloads from Microsoft. In fact, we're just finishing up work to make any need for DCOM or MSI or any other 'common downloads' from Microsoft unnecessary.
It's always nice when the other guy blinks :-).
The delicious irony of this is that they use Wine heavily internally to run Notes.
I don't have any clear visibility into why this is; I get a lot of hemming and hawing about it, but no clear vision. I suspect some back room handshake agreement with the folks in Redmond, but have no real proof for that.
They try to raise an argument about patents, but IBM themselves know that a proven monopolist cannot successfully prosecute a lawsuit over patents (which is why IBM prosecuted no such cases from 1935 until 1985, because they got slapped in 1935 for antitrust violations when they did so).
A perhaps more straight forward explanation is that using Wine greatly reduces the amount of services that IBM can provide you with :-/.
I'm glad someone else said this...when I said it I figured folks would think I was just whining (although we are the Whine guys :-/).
The CrossOver Plugin functionality was rolled into CrossOver Office (that was one of the key changes in 3.0).
The sales and marketing guys are already on my case about this; I'm trying to do better. (Actually, that last link is pretty darn cool, imho).
And, if you donate to WineHQ, I'll see that that money flows through to buy apps for Wine hackers (mostly games, I want to send Lionel a tub full).
Sorry for the confusion. There was a [grin] in angle brackets after that, only that seems not to go through to HTML posts very well.
It was all meant as a jest. I think Software Patents are an evil blight on the land.
All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree. I think its fair to say that Wine runs MS Office 2000, XP, Photoshop, and a wide range of applications only because of the money our customers have sent us. So, yes, I think it makes a huge difference, and we greatly appreciate it.
Further, there is one misconception I wish to correct. We've actually changed our development process recently so that all of our Wine work goes to the public Wine tree as soon as our developer makes the change, without regard to CrossOver releases.
Cheers,
Jeremy White
CEO, CodeWeavers