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Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

Basically a free clone of CrossOver, which has used “bottles” to refer to separate Wine prefixes for 20 years.

(disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers)

Wow that is actually super rude. I paid 500 dollars for crossover and tried to use it and found that it lacked features that bottles offered. To flippantly call it a clone and imply that it doesn't offer anything special is really unnecessary.

(disclaimer: I don't work for CodeWeavers)

Clones can develop their own features and go their own way. I don't think calling something a clone is necessarily rude.

At some point it will be significantly different that it probably shouldn't be called a clone though, but if it currently has the same name as a feature in a pre-existing, popular software, "clone" seems like the right word.

I imagine whomever built "bottles" (the clone, not the Crossover feature), probably used code, or at least was inspired by code, that CodeWeavers upstreamed to Wine.

Basically, that's false information. The reason why Bottles is called that is because, well, wine is normally stored in bottles. I think it's the most straightforward reasoning one can make. (Disclaimer: Bottles creator here).

I have never been inspired by CrossOver, never used CrossOver (maybe the version for Chromebook, but I'm not certain), and was not aware of CrossOver's terminology Taking a look (from what can be understood from the screenshots), well, the two software are extremely different, and the only similarity is actually their purpose, which is to simplify and automate Wine.

If I were you, I wouldn't have mentioned that you're on the CrossOver team because it's not a wise statement to make.

Winebottler for macOS (https://winebottler.kronenberg.org/) uses the term as well.

code weavers is basically a clone of irl tapestry

I don’t work for codeweavers and will still say that this is unfairly benefiting from the existing terminology created by codeweavers.

They could have literally picked any other name.

What if they didnt know about codeweavers using the name? Wine goes into bottles (in the real world)... its a play on words.

Almost anyone using Wine is familiar with the term and CodeWeavers’ usage of it.

I'm not, but I'm not a terribly advanced Wine user. (Though I'm sure now I'll notice it everywhere. :D)

I'm sure Microsoft was familiar with not only windows on buildings, but also other OSes' use of the term "window" as a GUI element (dating back to Xerox Alto in 1973), and called their 1985 product "Windows" anyway, so there's precedent.

Microsoft literally researched every tech article about GUIs to extract all the terms journalists used to describe them. They then chose the most common word from all these articles.

Maybe I'm the exception (wine user from the very early days).

I've been using wine for well over a decade and I was not aware of it. I'm not so confident that your characterization here is accurate.

Everyone I know that uses wine just follows some youtube video to get some game working on linux. They don't spend a lot of time learning about the ecosystem.

I guess you’ve been living under a rock then, since CodeWeavers and Valve are two of the largest paracontributors to the Wine ecosystem.

i've been in linux for decades and listen to multiple linux podcasts every week and follow multiple linux communities. valve, proton, lutris, wine, all of these things are mentioned constantly. codeweavers is mentioned almost never. it definitely isn't living under a rock to not be familiar with codeweavers. i would go so far as to say that most people who use wine have never heard of codeweavers.

I have to partially agree. When I started, codeweaver was hard to miss. I guess it was a different time back then? Must have been 15 years. For me, it was the other way around. My first wine experience was using codeweavers, and then I learned about wine itself. If you searched to run MS Office apps on Linux / Mac, codeweavers was the first result. Perhaps this was only true for Linux beginners. They had (have?) an easy to use commercial wrapper around it, with different Windows apps (especially office) working with no additional configuration.

I think you may be misunderstanding me to say that I was unaware that codeweavers existed, but that wasn't the issue. The issue at hand is whether "bottles" ripped that terminology from codeweavers. I have been plenty aware of codeweavers existence, but that doesn't mean I had any reason to believe they were the originators of using "bottles" to mean what it means today. What my previous comment intended to say, was that I had no idea codeweavers coined the term "bottles" and I don't know that it's fair to assume "bottles" assumed it was something exclusive to codeweavers.

Why would anyone assume that was some pseudo-trademark of codeweavers? It's not particularly clever and anyone could come up with it. I would've assumed literally anyone in the wine ecosystem could've come up with it and given codeweavers (nor anyone else) did not file for a trademark then that suggests they don't care that it was "ripped" from them to begin with.

My whole point of view is that there seems to be some assumption of malice or feelings slighted where there's no evidence that codeweavers feels slighted or that bottles was being malicious. I generally think the internet would be a much better place without assumptions of malice.

I've known about wine for years and literally only learned that CrossOver exists this morning on HN in the steamdeck thread.

> and CodeWeavers’ usage of it.

To clarify, what do you mean by this? Does CodeWeavers use the term "Wine" somewhere in a product? (I thought that's CrossOver?)

Codeweavers invented the term ‘bottles’ for wine encapsulation

I mean, it's a bit obvious,no? Invent seems like a strong word.

I'm not enough to know they used "bottles"

> unfairly benefiting from the existing terminology created by codeweavers

Seems like a stretch. I don't see a problem with reusing good terminology. It's not like it's trademarked.

I can see "bottles" becoming the generic term, it makes more sense than "prefixes".

This. Bottles are preconfigured packages of programs on Wine, while prefixes are just Wine sub-environments.

If they want to own a name, they should trademark it.

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