Hacker News Reader

Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

Apple has forked (or something) crossover a while ago and has released their own tooling for playing games on macs. You can use this pretty easily without a lot of config using Whiskey or Heroic Games Launcher.

I've been playing Jagged Alliance 3 the past few days which I bought on GOG.

This is all free btw.

View on HN

I believe it was Wine they forked https://www.winehq.org/

Kind of. It’s Wine with a bunch of Crossover patches plus Apple’s own changes. Codeweavers employees are the primary maintainers of the Wine project, and they open-source any Crossover-specific changes they make to Wine code (since Wine is LGPL).

(Source: GPTK logs a lot of messages containing the word “Crossover” while running games.)

Does Apple upstream their modifications?

I mean, it's sweet that you asked.

Hope dies last

They released a giant ruby blob of their patches. Usable, but certainly not cooperative. I wish Apple would get over themselves and just contribute to WINE. Make it seamless and easy for developers, and help fix the bugs as they find them. They are stuck in the middle of the chicken and egg problem while refusing to hatch some eggs.

For companies, contributing to open source projects is generally around 10x slower than just forking and doing it all internally. So it may be primarily just because it's easier for them.

The main reason I've been pushing really hard to get the code I work on upstreamed is to reduce merge conflicts when I pull from upstream! But it's a real slog.

True, and I've run into similar issues as well, especially with legal. At the very least they could release a cleanly mergable set of diffs, commented for the benefit of whatever poor soul had to merge that 20k patch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com