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Feature: Migration
Codeweavers sees Mactel move as an opportunity
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CommentsWith Crossover and its sister product, Crossover Office, Linux users can natively run popular Windows software such as Microsoft Office, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Adobe Photoshop.
Developers also are making use of Crossover technology in porting Windows applications to Linux. Now that Apple has decided to move to Intel architecture, CodeWeavers' CEO Jeremy White says that means a boon for developers who want to make their Windows software available to Mac users because the porting process will be much simpler. Under the current PowerPC architecture, a developer would have to start from scratch in order to create a Macintosh port.
"What will be interesting to find out is whether CrossOver will be useful to the average Mac user, particularly since Mac users have a very high quality body of native software available. I'm hoping it will be invaluable, but that is predicated on us making some very major strides with Wine over the next year," says White.
CodeWeavers is actively seeking to increase licensing of its technology to developers. White says it averages about 15% of revenues, but he hopes to "grow it substantially." White foresees that eventually about 50% of CodeWeavers' business will be to software developers, and the other half to end users of Crossover.
Tina Gasperson writes about business and technology from an open source perspective.
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on Codeweavers sees Mactel move as an opportunityNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Yeah, it's not Free Software, but it provides the source for the projects it uses (more than is required for BSD/X11 licensed code.) And it can "get away" with using the GPLed installer because they are in no way linking their program with it at runtime.
Wine <a href="http://kerneltraffic.org/wine/wn20050617_279.html#1" title="kerneltraffic.org">switched to LGPL</a kerneltraffic.org> a while back, that's why it is progressing so well again these days.
The stuff that CrossOver includes and doesn't open, isn't theirs to open for the most part, it's Microsoft's freely distributable stuff. Work is coming along nicely on Wine native versions of these components, and the folks at Codeweavers, and Transgaming are good about helping to make that happen.
I follow <a href="http://kerneltraffic.org/wine/latest.html" title="kerneltraffic.org">Wine Traffic</a kerneltraffic.org> pretty closely, and there's lots of really neat stuff coming real soon, like webcam support for MSN, etc. I'm not sure why anyone would want Office for Linux though, OpenOffice2 is amazing. It's worth it to just do the switch now, rather than later.
My reading of things is that they have paying customers that pay to get certain things working and so Codeweavers sometimes resorts to ugly hack to get these things accomplished.
There is some delay getting things contributed back to wine and surely some of that is to differentiate crossover from wine, but I don't think there is much that doesn't get contributed back eventually and in many cases they don't want those ugly hacks going back into wine they want to come up with a proper solution.
Are you sure you are not confusing crossover office with Cedega?
CrossOver Not Open Source
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 26, 2005 05:42 PM"ended up building open source software that allows users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems to run Windows applications"
Virtually everyone who has ever looked into Wine or CrossOver knows this, but for "teh n00bs" (and apparently the editors) CrossOver Office(TM) is NOT open source. It's Proprietary, though that was not mentioned once in the article, at least that I saw. Let's not confuse things here. It CONTAINS an open source project (Wine - LGPL) but also contains a lot of proprietary code as well, meaning it certainly doesn't fit the open source definition as a whole.
That said, CodeWeaver's does an excellent job of supporting Wine (the actual open source part) by contributing much of the code it develops back to it (more than is required by the LGPL) and even employing the project leader.
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