I am very happy to report that we've shipped CrossOver Mac 8.0 and CrossOver Linux 8.0.

As with all of our major releases, this has been a long and difficult process. Of course, we couldn't have done it without our fantastic beta testers and our great community of Advocates. Thanks guys!

It's interesting to compare and contrast this release with our original CrossOver Office 1.0 release. With that release, we were scrambling like mad; putting out new test releases every few hours. Our whole goal was to make Word and Excel operate nicely - that's all we cared about. We had no customers (and desperately needed them), so time pressure was killer. We went from idea to release in about 3 months. It was a great time to be at CodeWeavers - frightening, exhilarating, and great fun.

CrossOver 8 has been a year in the making (364 days to be precise :-/). When we start picking what goes in a release, we always look at our top lists. So Internet Explorer 7 was a given. But from there, it wasn't as clear. In truth, we're in a period of change at CodeWeavers. We're slowly shifting from running a few applications on Linux to running almost all applications on both Mac and Linux. And, of course, 'all' is a hard milestone to set for a release; you'll never ship with that goal.

At the same time, we've made some sweeping changes in our support infrastructure. Our secret Ninja Support Team has been enabling us to triage customer issues more completely. So I made the decision that CrossOver 8 would see a return to our roots - that is, I wanted to focus some attention back on our core applications - things like Microsoft Office and Quicken. It's been a hard struggle to make Office 2007 work as well as Office 2000 did, but I think we've largely crossed that bridge. I'm very pleased with how well Outlook 2007 is working for me (although the horror of using Outlook sometimes overwhelms my open source soul ).

More importantly, we're actively trying to raise the bar - so if you have any remaining issues with Outlook 2007, or any of the Office products, please file a ticket. We want to eliminate all remaining errors.

Of course, the 8.0 release remains drastically different from the 1.0 release. Twelve months instead of 3. The urgency was around not breaking things, instead of shipping quickly. And, while we did print out our famous 'Chicken List' (the list of things we do before release, traditionally running around like chickens with our heads cut off), everything went smoothly and without undue fuss (even with Andrew and I being out of town at key points).

So perhaps not quite as frightening, and maybe a bit less exhilarating. But still great fun!

Cheers,
Jeremy

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One of the most powerful resources our company has is our community of Advocates. These are the people who voluntarily choose to help test CrossOver and then share their knowledge with other CrossOver users. They write the Tips & Tricks. They post on the Forums. Often, they find ways to get applications running when we simply don't have the time. In short, they are absolutely critical to the success of our Compatibility Center, which is one of our most valuable resources. As such, I'm pleased to announce that we've made a major set of changes in our Advocate program.

Some of these new features are modest tuneups our advocates have asked for, like being able to vote more than once, being able to easily advocate more applications, and having advocate ranks be more meaningful. However, the really fun stuff revolves around morphing our Compatibility Center into the MMO 'World of Compatibility' . No, this was not some sick idea of our World of Warcraft-addicted COO. Well, maybe it was. But whatever its genesis, we've built a whole system for recognizing our Advocates and their contributions. Because now, when Advocates help others by posting, or submitting beta reports, or just by being upstanding CodeWeavers citizens, they earn Experience Points that let them gain 'ranks' and show off to the world just how cool and helpful they are.

As part of this effort, we've gone back and combed through the forum posts and beta reports that our Advocates have made down through the years, and awarded XP based on prior performance. So, not all Advocates will start at ground zero; we appreciate these folks' past efforts too much for that. Thus far, the highest ranked Advocates on our 'realm' are the redoubtable Andrew Skinner, and the enigmatically named Mensch. Both have been duly accorded the rank of Raging Atomic Dragon Turbo Chief Senior Advocate. But even higher ranks await, and no doubt others will rise to seek their destiny. And if we find that we have to scramble and invent some new ranks; hey, we can make that happen. Jon, our COO, lives to make new icons.

Anyway, we hope that this will be seen as a fun way to thank and recognize our Advocates. I have to say I'm particularly proud of this change. We took a problem - how to detect and handle Advocates that weren't really living up to their end of the bargain - and turned it on its head by making it a positive for the folks who really help us. Not only that, but it was fun for Jeremy Newman, Jon Parshall, and our team of elite Support Ninjas to dream up a way to implement all of this. So, to all of our Advocates - thanks! You have our deepest gratitude, and hopefully a fun way to see how important you are to us.

Now we just have to start figuring out appropriate rewards for uber-high XP earners...

Cheers,
Jeremy

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I've been in the business of trying to make Open Source into a business for about 10 years now. It's a long and hard process and I'm sometimes prone to bitterness and cynicism about it all, particularly when people just don't get it.

But I've recently read Bill Vass's blog about Open Source and our government. Bill makes a cogent argument that Open Source is superior because it is more secure than a proprietary solution. This reminds me that this whole proposition is about more than just making a living; it's also about doing things better. That is when I know we've really hit our stride - when people stop talking about this as a novelty, or as the cheap option, and instead really grasp that Open Source is just fundamentally better. Nicely, there is some real evidence that the U.S. administration is listening.

Perhaps I'll have to abandon some of that cynicism and bitterness after all...

Cheers,
Jeremy

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We've been making good progress towards CrossOver 8.0. In fact, we are feeling confident enough about our progress that we put out a public release of the first beta. We've done this mostly for our customers that use Quicken 2006. This way, they can upgrade to Quicken 2009 before the support for Quicken 2006 expires.

While we're pleased with the progress on 8.0, we do have a good bit of work to do. Internet Explorer 7 requires some polish, and our efforts to make Office 2007 progress to Gold rating needs a good bit more work as well. Of course, all of our efforts and the efforts of the Wine community as a whole, mean that even this beta build represents a significant progress. I'm really looking forward to releasing a more polished version sometime in the next month or so - I think CrossOver 8 is going to be fantastic! (Okay, I'm admittedly quite biased, but hey, I still think it's going to be a great release ).

Additionally, I'm happy to say that we've leveraged Francois Gouget's hard work, along with a lot of work from the broader community, and have put out unsupported builds for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Hopefully this will help spread some CrossOver joy to folks that may have been feeling neglected. After all, it's a bit hypocritical for us Linux guys to fault BSD and Solaris for having low market share. And I feel that the BSD community has responded to my challenge.

Note: I don't recommend this beta for most customers. It is likely to be unstable, and cause other problems. This is really a bleeding edge build for fairly advanced users who don't mind taking on a bit of risk. But for those of you crazy enough to try it, enjoy!

Cheers,
Jeremy

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I've just returned from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held in San Francisco last week. It was great fun - I enjoyed reconnecting with old friends, and getting a handle on the current state of Linux.

It also marks an important point in our development as a company. That is, several years ago, when the Intel-based Macs first started shipping, we poured an enormous amount of energy into our Mac product. More than half of our revenue now comes from the Mac market, and that new market has been a powerful boon to our company. We continue to focus heavily on the Mac market, further developing our products to help our Mac customers.

However, what is exciting for me, personally, is that the Linux market has not been standing still. The growth of desktop initiatives - particularly outside the US - along with the burgeoning netbook market has really made the Linux market attractive. And while we haven't been neglecting our Linux customers, it has been the case that the Mac has been the Apple of our eye, as it were. But I traveled to this conference because we made the business decision that we needed to give Linux equal time.

So this was an exciting return to my roots - my first love has always been Linux. I came away with some great ideas, and great hope for the future of Linux. We're planning a refresh of our Linux GUI this year, and so I look forward to continuing to provide the very best in Windows compatibility for Linux.

I also got to watch some interesting fireworks, although I was left with the uneasy feeling that our community was a bit too fast with the pitchforks and torches.

But now that I'm done with my travels for a bit, it's time to get that release out for Quicken...

Cheers,
Jeremy

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I've just spent the past 5 days in Nashville, Tennessee, bringing our chess club to the SuperNationals chess tournament - the biggest scholastic chess tournament of the year. This is my hobby - I discovered a few years ago that coaching kids in chess was an enormous amount of fun - even more fun than playing it seriously, as I had as a youth.

This trip to Nationals was the culmination of two years of planning, and the capstone of my older son's career with the club (along with several other key 8th graders). And what a great ride it was! 28 kids, a bunch of adults, one big magic yellow bus, and a whole lot of fun with chess!

We entered teams into 4 of the available 15 sections, and we won 1st place in a K-3 section, 11th place in one K-6 section, 1st place in the other (the one my younger son was playing in), and we also managed to win 1st place in the K9 section my older son was playing in. That last one was particularly touching for me; my son has worked really hard this past year, and all of his work paid off - his extra effort was a key difference between second and first place.

Here's a picture of the joyous team (not pictured are all of their trophies, which required a a whole bus compartment to carry):

Luckily, while I was off on the bus to Nashville, the team here has been cooking; we're making good progress on 8.0. We'll hopefully have something ready fairly soon.

Now I'm headed off to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. While I get to ride a plane, and not a bus, and even though I'm looking forward to it, I suspect it can't possibly be as much fun .

Cheers,
Jeremy

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I am not the biggest fan of snow.  I think every Christmas should have snow as there is nothing quite like a 'white Christmas' to warm the heart.  Just thinking of a night slay ride through the woods with the snow gently falling, trees decorated in lights, and the fresh scent of pine and sugar cookies in the air is nothing short of perfect.  But its not ever like that!!!  I can't remember the last time I had a slay ride, and the woods at night is really just kind of creepy.  Additionally, the snow never seems to fall gently in Minneapolis.  The snow is either a blizzard or sleet push around by treacherous winds smacking you in your ice cold face.  Unfortunately, I live in Minnesota where snow is a very real possibility from October to May.  So on April 3, I am officially declaring the weather to stop with the snow and give us citizens the sun we deserve.

Writing about things that I want changed has opened up my eyes to other changes I think we should see made today.  In addition to the weather, I want to see Microsoft come clean and change its new advertising slogan.  Instead of 'I'm a PC', I'd like to see the truth 'you're stuck with me like it or not'.  I'd also like to see the State of Minnesota make a change and take some initiative.  They can start by PICKING A SENATOR ALREADY and follow it up with lowering my taxes, refusing government bail out money, and placing a greater emphasis on supporting small businesses (the backbone of the new economy).  Finally, I'd like my 10 year old dog to make a change and stop making messes (you know what I mean) in the house.  If my three year old daughter can use the potty, I want my 10 year old dog to do the same. 

The purpose of this blog isn't just to rant.  Its also about hope.  We're already seeing some change... the weather is getting nicer, the state courts are upholding Franken's senatorial lead, my daughter is using the potty (of course my dog is oblivious to this little tidbit), and users do have choices when it comes to Microsoft.  In the coming months, CrossOver 8.0 will be released.  While not perfect, 8.0 will take significant steps to reducing the dependency on the Microsoft operating systems.  With some liberation from XP, Vista, and soon to be 7, users will be able to freely move from Windows to Macs to even Linux with little concern for compatible applications.  Imagine a world where users can choose what's best for them based on what's best for them.  That would be nothing short of perfect!

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Okay, so we've got our sales tax stuff all squared away (or so I hope; I'll find out tomorrow during the audit). Now we're driving hard towards completing CrossOver 8.0. We've done a ton of work that is going into CrossOver 8; we've got Internet Explorer 7 running, and we're working on 8. We've got a huge number of fixes for Microsoft Office, notably Outlook. And most importantly, we've got Quicken 2009 working along nicely. That's critical, because Quicken 2006 goes out of support in 30 days here.

The challenge with Wine, though is that it seems like it's always two steps forward, one step back. In the process of fixing some issues with MS Office, we improved Wine's support for the MSI (Microsoft Installer) technology. Unfortunately, one of those 'improvements' also made it so that no Microsoft Office product would install. As you can imagine, that is putting a real damper on our ability to put together a test build.

Of course, this is not a unique challenge; Microsoft struggles with this compatibility themselves. The Windows API is a clear product of evolution, not intelligent design. It's origin in DOS and the many false starts and design changes it has had through the years pretty much guarantees that 'Windows compatibility' is very difficult to achieve. When I'm in my cups, I'm willing to make the faux mathematical argument that the Windows API is a logical impossibility; that it is by its nature self contradictory. I keep waiting for it to vanish in a puff of improbability .

So we've been working through the years to combat this; Wine now has a great suite of regression tests. CrossOver has an application level set of tests. We continue to work on these and we hope to add some further application level tests to Wine soon.

But as I've been blogging, Aric and Hans have been working, and I'm told we have the problem patch reverted, and test builds are looking promising. Time for me to make sure we get our Quicken users the joy they need...

Cheers,
Jeremy

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I've been distracted this past week because I've been dealing with a sales tax audit. It turns out to be a fascinating glimpse into some of the collisions between a web-based business and the more traditional government processes.

Because our only significant office is here in Minnesota, we pay sales taxes only in Minnesota. And because Minnesota is a relatively small portion of our sales, we're just not talking about a ton of money, or a major issue.

Nevertheless, we've always worked to pay our sales taxes honorably, and I thought we did a pretty good job.

A nice auditor from the State of Minnesota has been gently helping me to see how wrong I was. You see, it turns out that the 'location' of a particular transaction is not as simple as I thought. I thought that it was just based on our office; that would mean we'd collect Minnesota tax, St. Paul tax, and another Twin Cities transit tax (in short, a single, easy to calculate tax).

But it turns out that, even though we're selling a purely digital product, we're supposed to tax people based on where the product is delivered to. And, to make it even more fun, the only way to figure out the tax for a given transaction is to look at the 9 digit zip code, not the 5 digit zip code we've been collecting all this time. So we have to grind all this info and figure out which of 25 different local tax zones we have to pay. Heaven forbid we should fail to deliver the $2.54 we owe the city of Duluth, for example.

But what a nasty collision: I want to build a simple web store to collect money so I can help pay people to improve Wine so people aren't forced to use Windows. But governments, particularly right now, are very interested in collecting every single penny they can. They don't especially care if it causes me heartburn. Now, to be fair, I have to admit that educating children and paying fire fighters is slightly more important than freeing the world from Windows.

Fortunately, market capitalism is alive and well. It turns out that there are at least four separate companies that provide a web-based service to companies just like mine. We can hook into a single web api, and then they promise to deal with all of the complexities of sales taxes.

So hopefully we'll get that figured out here quickly, settle up our back taxes, and I can resume my delusion that we're paying our taxes honorably. And, more importantly, I can get back to cracking the whip on Quicken, because we've got Quicken users to save...

Cheers,

Jeremy

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So I'm blessed with a wonderful wife. She helped support our efforts around World of Warcraft by playing WoW with me (up until I got sick of it at about level 40). Last summer, we decided we wanted to tackle Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). That is, we wanted to bring the Windows version to Mac and Linux.

So we both got accounts, and started playing. The idea was that I'd be the perfect beta tester, so that as we worked to officially support it, I could be a lead tester.

Nicely, the game engine itself works great in CrossOver and Wine. Unfortunately, the launcher, the main program that does updates and gets things going, is a .NET application, and it doesn't work. It's really the key to genuinely supporting LOTRO.

Now you can get around that, with a variety of pretty tough work arounds. So I've been using those for the last 6 months or so, and she and I have been gaming happily. We're up to level 47 now, and are having a great time. (As a digression, I need to boast about my wicked cool rig. I've got a Linux box hooked into our 40" Samsung LCD TV, with MythTV for our TV. And then when it's time to play, I get to play this gorgeous game on this beatiful large screen TV. My wife is often quite jealous ).

Unfortunately, our work on the launcher has become a nasty 'Tar Baby' that is deeply frustrating. I've had 5 different developers look at bugs in the launcher over many months, and I've even spent several weeks myself.

This happens every now and then with Wine. We'll get one application bug that is just a humdinger and it takes us forever to break through it. I remember that Project 2003 took us over a year to find. But when we finally did, it was a one line fix. We're having a similar struggle with Service Pack 1 for Office 2007. This is just one of the most maddening things about Wine. We'll get it eventually, but it's deeply frustrating along the way.

But this has been a lovely dimension to my job; it's fun to have my extra curricular activities dovetail with my day job like this. Now just to find a kinship on Vilya...

Cheers,
Jeremy

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Tom Wickline pointed out that it has been 8 months since I had put out a road map. So I thought I'd take some time to review what we've accomplished in these past 8 months, and what we hope to accomplish through the rest of the year.

This has been an interesting 8 months. We've deliberately been working on some very 'unsexy' initiatives. For example, we've been focusing a lot of energy on some 'under the hood' improvements to Wine. Things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level.

We have had some challenges; for example, we discovered, after working our heart out on a DIB Engine, that in fact, the DIB engine wasn't the magic bullet we were hoping for. (Instead, we've recently focused more energy on Gdiplus, and we're pleased with the performance boost that is giving things like Quicken).

One great result is that we're continuing to see a lot of broad success stories; an awful lot of applications just work better now than they ever have with Wine in the past.

We've just shipped a lot of those 'under the hood' improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.

In the next few months, we'll be shipping CrossOver Linux 8.0, and CrossOver Mac 8.0. That revision of our flagship product will bring support for IE7, modern QuickBooks versions, Quicken 2009 (at a nice speed), Photoshop CS3, and many many other improvements, particularly around Microsoft Office and specifically Outlook.

After we ship version 8, and make sure we keep Games fresh as well, we're going to turn our focus to our next major revision. In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use. I hope we'll have that available before the end of the year.

At any rate, we're looking forward to bringing you all of this work we've done - 2009 should prove to be a great year for CrossOver!

Cheers,

Jeremy

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I think BLOGS are interesting, pretty, funny, and nice.  However, I never feel that I have enough witty comments to make reading a BLOG worthwhile.  Don't get me wrong, I am rather cool (in my own mind).  HOWEVER, I am also rather boring.  I lead a normal life in the suburbs with a family and a dog.  Not the stuff that makes you jump out of your seat and go 'HOLY COW, THAT'S HOT!!!'.  So, I have decided to make up all the information in my BLOG postings so they are rather cool and rather dangerous.  I hope that you enjoy the alter-reality that I call virtual life....

First, TEAM FORTRESS 2 on a MAC is AWESOME.  I use CrossOver Mac Games to access TF2 on my MacBook Pro, and I LOVE IT.  I play way more then I should, and I am getting better almost daily.  The best part about TF2 in CrossOver Games is that the action is actually smoother then in Windows.  As a SNIPER, I can shoot the hell out of just about everyone and quickly run the ranks in the standings.  I am also a mean PYRO and a nasty HEAVY.  For the record, the stupid SCOUT update just stinks.  Baseball and baseball bat!!!  Really???  It could also be that I play two hours a day every day; but I'd like to think that TF2 in CrossOver gives me an advantage.  I can tell you I suck on Windows.

Next, I supported the LAME DUCK CHALLENGE.  If you were one of the 600,000 people that got a free license of CrossOver Mac or CrossOver Linux, we appreciate your support.  It has, however, come to my attention that many, many, many of you failed to register your software license.  THIS MEANS NO UPGRADES FOR YOU.  I'm not trying to be a 'dick' about this, but rules are rules.  If you are wondering why you are not in our system or can't get the upgrade to CrossOver Games 7.2, chances are that you did not register your serial code at http://register.codeweavers.com by November 30, 2008.  If you're hoping to register now (in March), the best I can do for you is a SPECIAL DEAL CODE to save you some serious money in your purchase of the best Mac-Windows virtualization software.  Again, I am not a 'dick' but the LAME DUCK CHALLENGE has ended.

Next, I'll be using this space to venture out into all sorts of topics both technology and non-technology related.  I am going to start using this space as personal therepy to reduce my stress and calm my nerves.  Those ideals may not hold up well, but I am going to give it an honest shot.  And lastly if you're looking for me in other places on the 'net, you can follow my Twitter feed (jbramey@msn.com); reach me on FaceBook (James B. Ramey), and even find me in Linked-in (James B. Ramey).  I'm like that mouse from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon ... 'I'm everywhere'

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Last spring, I was frustrated, because it seemed like many Mac users were not aware of CrossOver Mac.  CrossOver is so much faster and easier to try than any of the other alternatives, it seems a crime to me that every Mac user doesn't try it first.  It's not always the perfect solution, but when it works, it is very sweet.

However, since we believe in Free Software, and provide all of our core work to the free Wine Project, we're not exactly rolling in the marketing dough.  So we had lunch with our PR firm to see what we could do with a bit of creativity.  We had a lot of ideas, and this scheme of doing a Lameduck Challenge came up just as I had to leave the meeting.  The idea was we'd give our software away for free if George Bush could accomplish any of a range of fairly challenging goals.
I circle back later, and discover that our COO and Republican VP of Sales has decided it's a winner, and we're going ahead with it.  I had some reservations; I love to make light hearted jokes, but I was not interested in denigrating the office of the President or in offending a lot of Republicans.  But after being reassured that a survey of Republicans and Independents did not turn up anyone deeply offended, we pressed ahead.

We announced it with great fanfare...and watched it sink into nowhere.  No pickup, no interest, no buzz; a marketing gimmick that no one cared about.
We did some follow up work on it, had some fun with it, but again, we got little or no interest.

And then we had the financial market meltdown.  Followed by the radical tightening of belts everywhere and plummeting gas prices.  Suddenly what had seemed improbable happened - gas cost less now than it did a year ago.

Now we had a choice - no one but a few people had noticed (see 'sunk like a stone', above). We could just pretend it never happened.

But what the heck, a promise is a promise.  Besides, no one cared with the first round, so who was going to pay attention this time?  We'd give away 10,000 copies maybe, 50,000 tops.

Oh, how wrong we were.

I think that Andrew Lavallee expressed it best in his post on it:  CodeWeavers is learning what happens when you scream “Free Software” in a crowded Internet.

So we announced it on Monday, October 27th.  We had tested out our system for giving away the software the previous week; we have a rich experience that went through the whole process, got the customer an account and a support entitlement, the whole nine yards.  Late Monday night we cut over live to giving away the software, just to shake out the bugs.  (It was supposed to start at midnight, Central Time, we actually cut over at about 10:00 pm, 2 hours early).

Our first sign of trouble was that the server load shot up through the roof right then on Monday night.  It would not recover for several days.  Jeremy Newman worked with it that entire night; we kept tuning and optimizing the whole way, pruning parts of our rich experience down.  Each time we'd handle a new jump in the load, we'd get slammed even harder.  What was fantastic about it was that the traffic was coming from all over - we were reaching people all across the world, in all different walks of life.

I woke up at 6:30 and checked in with Jer, just as things started to really head south.  The last straw came when both Slashdot and Digg picked up on the story; our server simply could not keep up.  All of our tuning and trimming and slimming down to a bare bones rich web site just wasn't getting it done.

Now here is where being a small nimble company is extremely gratifying.  We had been from plan A to plan B through plan C.  Jeremy Newman had been up all night working different approaches.  And he still had enough gas in him to execute 'plan N', which was an utterly bare bones CGI page that took your email, slapped it into a flat file, and gave you a download and did nothing else.  Our site went down hard at about 8:30; by about 9:15, it was back up and running smoothly, handling every single request that came in.  The web site hummed along all of the rest of that day, the 28th, the day we had promised to give our software away for free. 

By the end of the day, we gave away 650,000 copies of our software.  We believe that is the largest give away of its kind in the world, ever.  It was much more of a challenge than we expected, but I feel very proud of our team and Jeremy Newman in particular; he made sure that we were able to fundamentally honor our promise, despite the unexpected and overwhelming demand.  I also should put in a good word for our bandwidth provider, Panther Express; they deserve a great deal credit for the files being delivered.

And, I believe, we reached more people in one day than we had ever reached before, and we have exposed a lot of people to the goodness that is CrossOver.  I am very pleased with that result.  650,000 people tried our software in one day (in typically takes us about a year to serve that many trial downloads); we more than doubled our customer base.

Of course, the jury is still out on what it's going to cost us; our online single copy sales have been down about 25% since the challenge.  It's not clear if thats the economy, the lack of a new version (we're working on it, really!), or the Lame Duck challenge.  It's probably a mix of all three, but probably the largest factor is the Challenge.  Even so, I'm very happy with the result - the more people know about CrossOver, the better.

One other great thing is that we were contacted and thanked by people from all over the world.  A lot of people gained an appreciation for what we're trying to do; the fact that we represent a Microsoft Free way to run Windows applications; the fact that we work with a broader community to provide freedom to our customers.

Now if only people would stop writing in and saying "Gee, I missed the Lame Duck challenge, do you think you could...."

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So in a CodeWeavers management meeting one day, we were looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications.  What we needed was a freely redistributable application; one that didn't exist on Mac or Linux, but one that was readily understandable.  We thought about Firefox; that was perfect, but sadly, there were Mac and Linux builds.

And then a little bird flew in the Window and chirped 'Chromium', and we knew we had it.

So on Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill.  I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible.  By Friday, we had a first working build.  But it had a major problem - you couldn't do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out.   Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll.  Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed.  A little more than a week later, and he had done it.  Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux.  Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be.  In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.  Imagine what we can do for you.

Frankly, it's events like this that remind me just what a joy it is to work with everyone at CodeWeavers, and with the broader Wine community.  One of the greatest joys in life is to do meaningful work, and to get to do it with such fantastic people is an added bonus.  I'm looking forward to our annual party in a few weeks.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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I thought I'd take some time to update our road map and lay out our plans.

Today we've shipped CrossOver Games 7.1, which fixes a lot of niggling bugs in a variety of games.  Our game team is going great guns, and I think that 2008 will see some steady gains with games.  We hope to improve on City of Heroes/Villains, get proper Lord of the Rings Online Support in place, and just generally broaden the range of games that play well with CrossOver.  The LOTRO support is particularly critical, as my wife and I just started pla...er...testing together.

For regular CrossOver, we're likely to ship another bug fix release for regular CrossOver as well, as we've got a number of issues with Office 2007, particularly Outlook, we're ironing out.  We may do incremental 7.x releases all through 2008, as there is quite a bit to shake out. The Microsoft Office products are always harder, by at least a factor of 10, than any other Windows application we support.

After that, we're going to continue some major work we've been doing; I hope we can bring some or all of this to fruition in 2008.  This includes some work on the DIB Engine and gdiplus; both are core technologies that we hope will help dramatically improve performance and compatibility, particularly with some very recent software releases.  We also hope to have better support for .NET, which should allow us to expand our application reach to modern versions of Quickbooks, along with a range of other applications.  We're also hoping to refresh the Linux GUI.  Other folks have been doing some hard work on iTunes; we're hoping to capitalize and improve on that, and I still crave the NetFlix viewer on my MythTV box.  And, of course, we constantly strive to improve Wine so that everything will just 'work better'.

We're also looking to have some fun this summer and fall; look for an announcement from us next week.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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Hello,

In the past weeks we have been working hard on getting CrossOver 7.0 out the door and help on the Wine 1.0 release. Now that both are released, we are are continuing our work on CrossOver Games.

Today we have released a new unsupported build, and we are heading towards a new supported build.

In the next days we plan to fix the HTML and Guild Wars bugs remaining in the unsupported build, and then start a beta test for a new supported build. This new build will not have support for new games, but it will have some bugfixes and code based on Wine 1.0 and potentially run unsupported applications better.

Once this is done, we will turn our effort towards supporting more applications. So if you have not done so already, please vote for your games in our application database, since your votes and advocate activities are our main guidelines when deciding for new applications. We are considering Lord of the Rings Online since there is a lot of activity on this game and our .NET work is going forward. The currently top voted unsupported game is City of Heroes, so we want to look into this as well. Beyond that I want to take a new look at new high end games like Call of Duty 4, Age of Conan and dxlevel 95 support in Half Life 2 based games to get a new idea about the current state of the Mac graphics drivers. I cannot promise at this point that we will get all this going, but that is certainly the direction we are going to go.

Have fun,
Stefan

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Today marks a major milestone for me, personally, for CodeWeavers, and for the Wine project.

Not only did we ship CrossOver 7, our best CrossOver yet, but we, together with the rest of the Wine community, shipped Wine 1.0 today.

Wine 1.0 has been 15 years in the making, and includes 9 of the hardest years I've ever worked in my life. When I became involved with Wine and Free Software in 1999, the concept that you could successfully give away your work and still stay in business was foreign; Open Source business models were laughed at, Linux was unknown, and everyone was just waiting for Apple to die. Using an operating system not made in Redmond was considered ridiculous.

Today Apple is reinvigorated, Linux is flourishing, and Open Source business models are everywhere; in fact, very few startup technology companies are not Open Source companies in some way.

And, most importantly to me, our quest to see a stable, highly functional and usable version of Wine is complete. Wine 1.0 is certainly not perfect, and thus neither is CrossOver 7, but they both offer a real opportunity to use Windows programs on Macintosh or Linux system in a seamless way. This means that we have worked, in our way, to eliminate that applications barrier to entry, and allowed people to enjoy an alternate operating system of their choosing.

I am very grateful to the many people that have supported our work, from our customers, to our fellow Wine developers.

But now I'm going to go celebrate. It's rare that you have a chance to celebrate a milestone such as this, and I do not want to miss it.

But tomorrow we'll get back on track to continue to improve Wine so that we can continue to strive to make every application work perfectly.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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(With apologies to Paul Masson)

We have had a long struggle this spring, and now into summer. We've been working hard to make Wine, and therefore CrossOver, run Microsoft Office 2007, particularly Outlook. I had hoped that we would have this working much earlier in the year. The signs were promising; we had the installation issues figured out and early runs were very encouraging.

Unfortunately, reality has been crashing down hard lately. This last weekend was particularly rough. We had done a large round of internal testing, and were feeling pretty good. We built a release candidate to share with a group of private testers, thinking that if all went well, we could ship this week. I then went camping with my family (and we had a great weekend camping). Sadly, on Sunday, I came back, only to find nothing but negative beta reports; failure after failure. And to make matters worse, we had 4 ticks that had hidden in our stuff and chose to come out only on Sunday night after we'd unpacked.

But the bottom line is that we can't ship until we feel confident that it will work well across a broad range of scenarios, not just on our desks with our versions of Office.

So we had to regroup this weekend. I think we've now come to understand that certain non US versions of Office, and Enterprise editions, have some issues (and they're challenging for us, as they're not easy for us to buy). So hopefully we'll be able to get CrossOver 7 shipped here shortly. And then as soon as we do that, we're going to turn around and push out another release of CrossOver Games; we've got some fixes in the pipeline there.

Of course, our own struggles reflect those of Wine itself. We are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming release of Wine 1.0, after 15 long hard years of work. We look forward to providing a stable and polished way to use Wine 1.0 in CrossOver, as well as doing the work to bring Wine to 2.0 and beyond.

And now my family and I are off to Yellowstone. We're not camping, so hopefully the ticks won't get us...

Cheers,

Jeremy

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We go through our days looking for meaning and purpose to our lives, and I think I've found just that in playing Team Fortress 2.  While I am getting better almost daily, I have found several life lessons from killing (and being killed) in the course of hours (and hours) of gameplay.  I thought I'd share a few of the more poignant lessons.

10)  Rushing into any situation with guns blazing and little forethought only leads to a quick and painful death.
9)  Having great focus (Sniper) without any direction or goals is meaningless.
8)  Being the fastest (Scout) or the strongest (Heavy) isn't nearly as effective as being prepared.
7)  You can heal (Medic) the pain of others, but you're not very effective if you do so at your own expense.
6)  You can successfully build (Engineer) almost anything, but you should always have a contingency plan for when things blow up.
5)  Using only one of the weapons at your disposal (Demo) only insures that you'll be the first to run out of ammo. 
4)  If you make your living in the shadows (Spy), its only a matter of time before you're caught.
3)  If you are close enough to light the fire (Pyro), you are most likely close enough to feel the heat.
2)  Having everyone play the same role (Soldier) is the easiest way to getting nothing accomplished. 
1)  All of us are better then any one of us.

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I guess I don't have much to say because I find it difficult (even challenging) to keep up with my BLOG.  I admire people that have the ability to consistently write witty and interesting thoughts on a daily basis.  Me, I am more of a monthly, bi-monthly, even quarterly guy which equates to dull and sparatic.  In almost every context, dull and sparatic are not good adjectives.  I mean no one strives to be dull and / or sparatic.  Some people accept their limitations and try to put a good spin on it as to say that they are reliable, dependable, or even easy going.  I don't buy that either.  Sometimes less is more, but I think with BLOGs more is more.

My experiences, though, are very interesting as of late.  I am working with a variety of individuals and companies from around the world on their technology projects.  Some projects are incredibly vast and complicated - like assisting government agencies in Africa in moving to Linux or delivering "the mail" across a Linux enterprise for a media company in Germany.  I am involved in providing elementary students with the portal to visit vast virtual worlds and also in making the computers more usable for the visually impared.  Other projects are very personal - like working directly with individuals who are trying to create and build their own Linux-centric technology companies or assisting a dad in trying to make a mapping program work on his daughter's laptop.  In both the micro and macro projects, I see first hand how technology is evolving and impacting the lives of so many people.  If only I could put all those thoughts and feelings into words.

When I see the opportunities available with technology today, I am simply amazed.  Imagine delivering standard applications across mixed platforms or porting specific PC applications to Linux and Mac environments.  10 years ago, this was not possible.  10 years from now, it may be ancient history.  I truely enjoy being a part (if only the smallest part) of the technology revolution.  If only, I could write it down more.

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So today, Stefan was helping someone that posted a cry for help on our forums.

In digging a bit further, he discovered that this guy was actively working against us, as you can see by searching for bonkeykong on this pirate site.

So this is like stealing a car from me, then giving the garage door opener in the car to a buddy so the buddy can go to my garage and steal my other car. Then, after he's driven around a bit, he calls me up and asks where to find the gas cap. If I had that much gall, I'd be a much richer man.

It's also terribly amusing that the poster doesn't realize that we essentially give away our work for free, and that there is a straight forward way to get this for free, that has forums where people will help him, and where his willingness to help will in turn be entirely a force for good.

Further, if he wanted to go with CrossOver, we have a free trial, and we offer a money back guarantee (which, if you're a clever Pirate, is a perfect way to get a free copy and annoy us at the same time). Heck, you can sign up to be an Advocate and totally p0wn us!

But no, bonkeykong decided car jacking was his thing.

It hurts a little; people like this seem to assume we're a nameless faceless and therefore somehow 'evil' corporation. We're not. We're people; hard working, overly idealistic, often underpaid people.

Of course, I'm not a stooge for the RIAA. Digital technology changes things; making a copy of a bag of bits is not the same as knocking me over and taking my wallet. bonkeykong isn't going to roast in a circle of hell because of this, although maybe he'll be darned to heck if we're lucky .

And I am adamant that I only want people's money if they are cheerful to give it to us.

But I think it's positive proof that Pirates aren't very bright, so this counts as a point for the Ninjas!

Cheers,

Jeremy

(11 Comments)

I thought I'd take a minute to go a little more in depth on our recent announcement of 'experimental' builds of CrossOver.

It is a very exciting time for Wine - we've been making great strides on our way to Wine 1.0, and I'm thrilled with that progress.

But sometimes we struggle with the success and progress of Wine. We'll get customers that come to us and say "CrossOver stinks, Wine runs my application much better." And what can be deeply frustrating is that often Wine will run their application because of our work. This has long been a struggle for us; while we do a lot of the active development on Wine, we take a lot of time to refine that and polish it so that it works reliably before we ship a CrossOver release. Sometimes that makes people complain that CrossOver is old and dull when compared to Wine.

Of course, if you've ever done technical support, you know that dull is good.

But many of our customers don't want dull. They want latest and greatest, the more bleeding edge, the better. And since we're often doing the bleeding edge work, it can be frustrating not to be able to give our customers our very latest work.

So now we have a facility that lets our developers take control. Any developer can now request of our QA lead to have a development build 'blessed'. If the QA lead does a modicum of testing, and feels that it is good enough, then we'll put the build up. That should hopefully speed up the process of making experimental builds available, and allow our developers to more directly interact with our customers.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(4 Comments)

Hello All,

Now that we've shipped CrossOver Games I want to outline our short term future plans for the next weeks and months:

One of the central ideas of CrossOver Games are quick updates. Since testing and making sure that all supported applications run takes a while, we want to release unsupported 'bleeding edge' builds regularly for those who want to try the latest and greatest code. During the crossover games beta phase Wine already moved forward a bit. I am currently working on stabilizing those improvements, once the supported games run properly again I plan to release such an unsupported build. The improvements include

* Performance improvements for Guild Wars and other games, especially on MacOS. I've written that during the beta testing of CrossOver games, but I considered it too unstable for adding it into the late betas.

* Bump mapping support for older radeon cards(radeon 8500 to 9200). This is a side effect of some architectural improvements I have made to provide a few potential Google Summer of Code Projects for Wine.

* Dynamic pixel format selection, some work done by Roderick Colenbrander(Thanks!). This can improve performance and it is required for Antialiasing support. Antialiasing is not fully supported yet, but the major obstacle is removed.

* Some improvements of our texture format support reporting, thanks to Roderick again. This is some work towards better support for floating point textures as needed for new games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis or Bioshock. This still needs to be polished a bit, many games like Half Life 2 do not like it yet.

* Some bug fixing

I hope that the build is ready within the next month, but I cannot promise it for sure if unexpected problems occur. I will keep you updated on the progress!

Thank you for helping us improve Wine, and have fun playing!

Cheers,
Stefan

(5 Comments)

Today we shipped CrossOver Games. I am very excited by this change; I have enjoyed computer games all of my life, and I like the idea that we can help others enjoy their new computers fully.

I'm also tickled by the story of how CrossOver Games came to be, and thought I would share it with you all.

We have long focused on productivity applications. Now, last year we did officially add support for games, and we made a few hires so that we could more directly support all of the great work being done in Wine on games. But, truthfully, our core focus has been on productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and Quicken.

So go back to last fall and early this winter. We're hard at work on the back breaking work of fixing Office 2007, Outlook, and recent Adobe products. We're grinding along, making slow progress. And all this time we keep noticing the most amazing progress on games. Stefan, along with the volunteers on the Wine project, is just raging in a cage; a day hardly goes by without another game running, or the framerate of a game rising, or a long standing game defect fixed.

And our Advocates start to notice; our Office support in our nightly builds isn't all that great, but boy is the game support coming along nicely.

And someone asks me: when are you going to ship all of this great work on games?

Well, I've sworn we won't ship CrossOver 7.0 until Office 2007 runs.

And, what's more, we really can't have CrossOver 7 be affected by games; after all, we need plenty of time to test and make sure it is stable and robust. At the pace and speed they are moving, before we finished a first QA run, they'd have a bunch more games fixes ready to ship.

In fact, Stefan and those game guys are going so nuts, they really should be on their own release cycle...

Doh!

So I'm happy to say that CrossOver Games came into existence strictly because of the brilliant work of a bunch of talented developers. You could argue that they forced my hand (forced, yes, it was torture for me to test Civ IV, torture, I tell you! ).

So, thank you to Roderick Colenbrander, Christian Costa, Alexander Dorofeyev, Stefan Dösinger, Jason Edmeades, Jason Green, Ivan Gyurdiev, Maarten Lankhorst, Vitaliy Margolen, Marcus Meissner, Oliver Stieber, Lionel Ulmer, Henri Verbeet and many others.

I am deeply grateful for all of their hard work, and I hope that we can help many people to enjoy the fruit of their labors, even if that enjoyment comes in the form of blowing each other to smithereens...

Cheers,

Jeremy

(21 Comments)

My entire life has been centered around playing video games.  I come from the generation that just played the heck out of games.  From my earliest Atari 2600 with 40 or 50 games to my Nintendo box, I have always been enchanted and captivated by video games.  Not that I was ever good enough to take on the world or even the best in my neighborhood, but I have always enjoyed the mental break that is derived from focusing on nothing else but dominating your enemies.

As I am getting older (and wiser), my focus is changing.  I appreciate more strategic games with less action but a more encompassing story.  I no longer want to destroy the world but instead save it from the bad guys (whomever they may be).  I no longer wish for the stress of having to make life and death decisions in fractions of seconds.  I want to foster growth, build and execute upon a drawn out plan, and release the benevolent leader from within. 

Actually, I just really stink at first person shooters and find them frustrating now as groups of 10 year olds pound me for sport and hobby.  I know some of these "young guns" have made their reputation off of beating me and me alone.  That's the only explanation I want to believe as to why I can't seem to survive long enough to check my weapons, aim, and fire.  That and my responsibilities as the Vice President, Sales keep me from playing hours on end.  That last line is a lie.  I actually play for hours on end at work, and I still stink which means it must be my state of the art MacBook.

The cold dark truth is that with the release of CrossOver Games I can't claim that my MacBook is the sole source of my 'suckdom'.  CrossOver Games is coming along very nicely.  Within the next week or so, we will be releasing the coolest emulation solution for Mac and Linux platforms.  Soon, you too can take on hordes of 10 year olds (hey, shouldn't these kids be at school???) in Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, and other really, really cool games.  While this functionality has been available in CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Linux for quite some time, CrossOver Games is the optimized platform specially tweaked to run games at native speeds.  Games is continuously updated to take advantage of all the latest and greatest CrossOver developments.  So far, my very embarrassing game play has been stable, very fluid, and very fast.  While I can't attest that CrossOver Games will make you a better gamer, I can testify that CrossOver Games won't be the reason why the 10 year olds use your carcass as bait (did I mention that these kids should be in school!!!).    

I know if I keep practicing for hours and days on end that I can get somewhat better.  Of course, my wife, my daughter, my friends, my family, my co-workers, and (most importantly) my boss have other plans for my time.  Without being able to make that time commitment, I'll never be an elite gamer and be able to turn pro.  I'll never be able to play in the 'big game'. I know what you're thinking and you're right.  My wife and my boss don't buy that excuse either.

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