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Comment by bartvk | Hacker News Reader

The biggest commercial contributor to Wine is CodeWeavers: https://www.codeweavers.com/

Fantastic and very sympathetic small company which offers a next-next-finish installation of Wine. Excellent if you run a Linux desktop in a corporate environment that expects the ability to run Windows stuff.

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Office 2010 and with the latest version Office 2013 work flawlessly with Crossover on Linux (and Mac): https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Office_2013_and_2010_on_Linux...

The support of codeweavers is very good and fast as well, the two times I had to contact them.

The bottle system is amazing. It allows you to have multiple wine environments with different Windows versions seperated, so not just one Wine for all. Office 2003 runs on Windows XP, 2013 on a Vista env.

The bottles can be exported to RPM or DEB or shell installer for easy deployment as well. Plus the easy online database with appliations and profiles makes Crossover, for me at least, have a big advantage over bare Wine.

What is the big difference comparing with PlayOnLinux?

PlayOnLinux is a community application using WINE and with CrossOver you get full time employees working on the latest issues on Wine and first releasing their fixes into the application.

They then turn the code over to WINE downstream. So when you help CrossOver you financially help WINE and a person who will help you with your problem within 24 hours. Also CrossOver gives you their bottle system and a great website to get your stuff working.

As far as I know, the "bottle" system is available in standard wine too (as wine prefixes), Codeweavers just provides a very fancy wrapper for the system and tools for managing the bottles. And that is definitely very handy if you want things to "just work" and dont want to fuss with prefixes yourself.

Just renewed my commercial license. CodeWeaver forms 2/3 of the Wine committers and contributes all their work first back into the Wine projects.

So worth every penny for the good cause.

Interestingly, CodeWeavers appears to be part of the reason in 2002 why Wine changed its license from MIT to LGPL. They were concerned about the fact that CodeWeaver's fork of Wine was proprietary.

(Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)#History https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2002-February/00...)

CodeWeaver's Wine variant still seems to be proprietary according to Wikipedia -- I wonder what made the relationship between CodeWeavers and Wine evolve.

While there is some proprietary glue, all changes to the Wine code are (as they have to be) open source.

I believe it was actually that a different fork of Wine was not contributing back which caused the license change. I want to say it was Cedega but memories are hazy at this point (since I'm an outside observer).

CodeWeavers's usage of Wine and other open-source projects has always been open-source. You can download our Wine fork source from our website[1]. We do use a small amount of closed-source glue to provide our installation magic and desktop integration.

Wine switched to LGPL due to other proprietary forks.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/products/more-information/source

> Wine switched to LGPL due to other proprietary forks.

Specifically, WineX aka Cedega

Seems like a pretty perverse incentive to have the project largely funded by a commercial company offering a repackaging of the open source product with some added features that Wine couldn't add themselves least they compete with the benefactor directly and lose their funding.

This phenomenon is not new, but it has become common enough to get a name: “Open Core”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_core

It works pretty well for Chromium / Google Chrome, Fedora / Red Hat, Debian / Canonical, etc. Even the various Android skins (whatever you think of them) probably fall under this description.

Does anyone know how well Wine works with peripherals? I have a Windows device and driver+library that I would like to use with Linux. I am currently using a VM but would consider using Wine to simplify my install.

Depends on what kind of peripheral you're talking about. If the OS supports it, and we have code to use that kind of device (e.g. joysticks, storage devices), then it should "just work." If you need to install Windows-only drivers to get your device to work, then it likely won't.

We do have a guy working on getting raw HID support to underlie our device handling, which will improve things like USB device support and may even eventually allow installing some Windows-only drivers. But we're not there yet.

Thanks for the feedback. The device I am looking to connect required Windows-only drivers that were custom developed. I will shy away from Wine and stick to my VM.

I'm a loyal crossover user and can only confirm the very well done easy setup, handling and transparent support for all kinds of Windows apps, also bought a licence to support open wine development.

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