Chris,
I understand your question, and to some extent I share your
frustration. I don't exactly understand the relationship between the
Crossover folks and the more general wine development community.
First, there is clearly sharing going on. There must be since many
of the bugs in the WineHQ Bugzilla system are assigned to and solved
by Codeweavers people. To that extent most certainly I think that the
Open Source version of Wine benefits from the work that Codeweavers
does.
However, and this is what I do not understand, my current version
of Crossover Office identifies itself as Wine-20040213. (yes...Friday
the 13th...) ;-) So, if so many things work on wine-20040213, then
how come so many things do NOT work on wine-20041019???
I understand that Codeweavers has put a lot of work into their
installer, and for me that is enough of a reason to spend some money
with them. That program gets my programs installed, and it's not part
of Wine, so if they are keeping technology secret in that area then
more power to them. I guess they own it and that's OK with me.
However, I am frustrated that so many things that appear to work,
according to the Wine Application Database won't install for me, much
less run. So far more than 75% of the programs I've tried recently die
during install in the debugger.
None the less, even if everything I've said is true, and it is
probably not, I still think Wine is an amazing accomplishment and
getting better. I'd like to support the effort, but it's hard to learn
and hard to make an impact at my level.
One idea I've had is to start some sort of more useful application
database. something more along the lines of a table that shows
applciation on the left and then a bunch of columns representing
releases of Wine. If we were to have user/owners of each app express a
willingness to test their one app against a new release of Wine every
month or so I think we'd have a better idea of what we can, as normal
users, expect to have work for us. I also think that it's a real shame
that the Wine App database doesn't include config file modifications
required to get applications to work. People learn things and then we
have to Google them out of the Internet and try applying them.
I realize that this idea is somewhat like Frank's Corner, and maybe
it could be done there with some of his help.
Anyway, that's my view. Wine is really great when it works.
- Mark
On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 23:45:38 -0600, Chris Cox <onebeer@yahoo.com>
wrote:> Does the non-free versions of wine known as Codeweavers Crossover ever make
it
> into the free versions? I really can't justify paying for Codeweavers
right
> now since I only use it every once in a while for one app. But it sure
works
> a lot nicer than the non-free version.
>
> --
> - Chris
> Linux 2.6.9-gentoo-r2 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP
> 23:43:35 up 2 days, 8:05, 7 users, load average: 0.29, 0.32, 0.21
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