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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest, how do these people make money?

As someone said it is a voluntary project but some companies make money from it like Transgaming (now Nvidia) which works by porting games to Mac OS X. So games like FFXIV for Mac are not native but actually a professional wine based wrapper.

And CodeWeavers, who were the first to reliably support Microsoft Office in the early 2000s. [1] They used to contribute a lot back to Wine (they probably still do). I think that Transgaming actually forked Wine before it became GPL-licensed. IIRC they were also not really contributing much back (at least in the Cedega times).

[1] This was a screenshot of my machine in 2004, running Microsoft Office under Wine under NetBSD's Linux emulation:

https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/daniel-cxoffice.jpg

CodeWeavers state on their website it's 2/3 of the Wine commits made by their developers and I pretty sure it's true.

At least most of complex features such as D3D11 support implemented by them.

windowmaker <3 damn, now I feel like installing it again

IIRC the Civilization series of games uses a professional wine-based wrapper for macOS as well.

Civ is a native port, they use DX11.

> Approximately half of Wine's source code is written by volunteers, with the remaining effort sponsored by commercial interests, especially CodeWeavers, which sells a supported version of Wine.

Thank you.

I used to work on wine full-time during my summers. The company I was working for was in cloud gaming, and linux was a better server environment. We used WINE to emulate the games. There are quite a few companies with a strong enough interest in WINE that they hire developers to work on it.

CodeWeavers takes corporate sponsorship of specific fixes that an application needs to be supported. First the MVP version ends up in their commercial product. Once the fixes required for a given app are cleaned up and refactored they roll these back into the opensource Wine project.

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