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

(7 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

(4 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.

(5 Comments)

I'd like to explain how we decide what to work on next and share our plans for 2008.

First, the big picture: the goal is to finish Wine so that it is a perfect reimplementation of the Windows API, thereby runing nearly all Windows applications flawlessly.

That is a huge challenge; it's going to take a while yet. And since I continue to miss the right Powerball numbers, we continue to bring out new releases of CrossOver to bring polished, if incomplete, versions of Wine to our customers. The idea is that we bring you joy with Wine as we work towards the ultimate goal, and that in gratitude, you buy CrossOver so we can buy food, mortgages, and more Powerball tickets.

Deciding how best to focus our efforts so as to both bring our customers the most joy and to keep Wine moving down that road is a hard challenge. I take as my primary input first the reports of problems from our active customers; I have a 'bugs pending tickets' report that is my primary priority list. Next, I use the list of top votes and pledges from our compatibility center. From there, I add in the estimates I get back from the developers on how hard something will be, and then mix in some intuition and go from there.

Normally, the intuition piece is a smaller role, but this year, we're going for a big leap. In the next few weeks we are going to launch a new product called 'CrossOver Games'. CrossOver Games is an entry level product that lets you play a broad range of games, particularly games with a lot of replayability such as MMOs like World of Warcraft and the range of games from Valve (e.g. Team Fortress 2, CSS, and so on). CrossOver Games will be available for free to any of our CrossOver Mac or Linux Professional customers. The idea is that we will rev CrossOver Games more quickly than regular CrossOver, so as to better take advantage of all of the great work being done on Wine with respect to games. The regular CrossOver will continue on a more stable and reliable pace. We're doing this in part to try to generate some buzz and interest; we feel like Rodney Dangerfield when it comes to games - we'd like to earn some respect. We feel strongly that CrossOver will be the finest way to run games on a Linux or Mac system, and we want to shout that from the rooftops!

Beyond the Games launch, we also have a lot of major improvements in store. We plan to launch CrossOver 7 for both Mac and Linux some time in April. The highlights of CrossOver 7 include support for Office 2007, as well as support for Photoshop CS/CS2 (and hopefully CS3) along with all versions of Dreamweaver, and a few other Adobe applications (thanks, Dan!). Of course, we have a lot of fixes our customers have requested. Office 2003, notably Outlook, should be much improved. Quicken 2007/8 should be able to connect properly with banks. There will be fixes across the board in other applications, notably Internet Explorer 6.

After CrossOver 7, we will turn our focus to several major areas where Wine is lacking. First and foremost is going to be better support for .NET based applications. We are hoping that will allow us to properly support modern versions of Quickbooks. We also hope to support modern versions of iTunes, and we're going to keep fighting to add support for things like the NetFlix player (if only so I can run them on my MythTV system). We'll also be implementing a DIB Engine - a tool we need to use to eliminate some performance bottlenecks in certain applications. This should help performance in Quicken, Visio, and Powerpoint for sure, and a range of other applications as well.

Essentially, our goal is to finish all of the basic building blocks that Wine needs. We hope to mark that event by releasing Wine 1.0. Of course, there will still be a lot of work to be done from there, but our hope is that increasingly applications will 'just work'.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(7 Comments)

The Minnesota Vikings use to employ a philosophy of drafting the best available athlete regardless of their position or the team's immediate needs. An interesting philosophy in that the Vikings believed that with the best athletes they could and would win a Super Bowl Unfortunately for the Vikings, this rule did not apply to coaches who lose NFC Championship Games at home. Yes, the loss to Atlanta (even after all these years) still stings.

For sales, many companies ignore the 'best athlete' philosophy and hire based on tenure, industry experience, product knowledge, and market connections. I have always believed that hiring in this manner is a poor indicator of future success, and I believe that it is only prevalent in my profession because its the safe decision to make. No one gets fired for hiring a person with the right pedigree? Its this line of thinking that allows the general public to think less of the professional salesperson.

For life, the path to success is almost always filled with hardship and pain. That's why its the lesser traveled road. In sales, I believe that the 'best athlete' is the salesperson who has achieved their success while overcoming significant challenges. In sales, consistently fighting through adversity is the hallmark of a champion. There is no substitute for the planning and tenacity that it takes to be truly successful, and this gift is not honed to a sharp point overnight. Personally, I truly enjoy surrounding myself with these types of people. Working with these 'best athletes' forces me raise my game and in turn become more successful.

For the marketplace, we are seeing many more consumers select the 'best athlete' as their personal computer. Apple and Linux are on the rise because more consumers are demanding better performance, greater usability, better functionality, greater style, more power, better value, and (maybe most important) fewer vulnerabilities. While Microsoft has the better pedigree, its performance has been compromised over its last few releases culminating with Vista. Even though Microsoft is still the safer decision for IT professionals, this decision is no longer going unchallenged because usability and functionality are becoming more critical. The end result is that we are receiving more requests from businesses and consumers wanting to run their PC applications on other platforms. From government agencies to educational departments to individual users, we are seeing the 'best athlete' philosophy is starting to take root. If these groups of consumers continue supporting these platforms instead of being satisfied with status quo, they may achieve the greatness associated with winning the Super Bowl (darn the Vikings!!).

For CodeWeavers, we are one of the 'supplements' making the 'best athlete' better. Consumers are becoming very interested in CrossOver because it is in-line with their desire for something better. CodeWeavers is essentially giving them their cake, and this message is slowly getting out to the masses. The positive reviews in the trade publications along with the press from Google is helping mainstream our efforts and is creating greater awareness for our software. As more consumers refuse the acceptance of solutions less apt to meet their needs, our growth and prevalence in the marketplace will only continue to increase. We might even live in a world where one day Microsoft is no longer reflective of a safe decision but of a decision made without much effort. I think even when that happens the Minnesota Vikings will still have a difficult time making the Super Bowl.

(0 Comments)

Hello world!

For those of you that have not met me yet, I am the Webmaster here at CodeWeavers. I am responsible for the wondrous array of front-end and back-end website code you see before you. I'm the guy you imagine pulling hair out behind the scenes when the website crashes (or worse). Yep, that'd be me.

I'm excited for our new public blog system. It gives us a chance to give you a glimpse at what goes on inside the hearts and minds of hard working weavers. Feel free to comment on our posts. We appreciate all feedback given.

(6 Comments)

Every great once in a while a sales rep hits what can only be considered 'Nirvana'. Account management is on target; customers are happy; leads are coming in the door; the phone is ringing; and proposals are going out. All the good stuff that every sales person dreams of when they picture the "perfect day". The opposite of Sales Nirvana, of course, is the reality that is every other day of your existence - not Nirvana. For the past four months (wow, four months), I have found my own slice of Nirvana at CodeWeavers. In learning the software, I am amazed and excited at the possibilities of what we have to offer. CrossOver eliminates the need for the Microsoft operating system!!! That's exciting. Any viable option to Microsoft is exciting, and I think users are seeing that today.

Monopolies upset the apple cart. They force people into situations they would otherwise prefer to avoid. Like the monopolies before it, Microsoft makes its living off of being the only game in town. While other desktop solutions existed (Linux, OSX, DOS, UNIX), no other operating system ran PC applications. When you are Microsoft and have the world by the 'nuts', you can allow yourself to get sloppy, belligerent, obnoxious, and even rude and the world takes it. When Microsoft introduced Windows 95, it marked a significant stake in the evolution of the computer universe. No longer did users have to have niche skills or be experts to use simple applications. When Microsoft introduced Vista, it marked a devolution in that the user was no longer important or even a consideration in the process. Software got complicated again by requiring users to know how to manage security settings to get joy. Somewhere along the way (probably while Microsoft was taking all its money to the bank), the world collectively decided to stop taking it and pushed back at the 'evil empire'.

In areas where wheelbarrows of money are not readily available and the median household income is considerably less then the US poverty level, Microsoft has lost its foothold on the throats of consumers. We now live in a world where users in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa are aligning themselves with a flavor of Linux. While Microsoft could justify that turn of events as "those people don't have money anyways", it has no answers to Apple stealing its market share in North America, Japan, and Europe. When your biggest rival doubles its market share in two years (Forbes), you take notice and fight back. Unfortunately, Vista is a punch in the face for most users and Yahoo would rather lay off employees then sell out to Microsoft. The resounding message is that the market is clearly seeking to move away from Microsoft's grip. THIS IS VERY EXCITING FOR CODEWEAVERS!!! This is our opportunity. This can become our Nirvana (or at least my sales' Nirvana).

Winning while others are loosing doesn't sound very sporting. I should hope that we all can win, be happy, find our Nirvana. However, Team Fortress 2 has taught me that winning consists of two very critical elements - beating others while staying alive. If that philosophy is good enough for my 'Heavy', it should be good enough for me. If finding our Nirvana means the Microsoft takes a couple shots to the head, who am I to stand in the way of our happiness.

(1 Comments)

Welcome to our first public blog post!

We plan to use this blog as a tool to share news tidbits and thoughts that don't fit into formal announcements or press releases.

My hope is to share our thinking and plans as they evolve. I also hope that this will help spur folks to write to us to share ideas and thoughts on how we can do a better job. While we try to have a broad range of forums, both general and specific to applications, you should always feel free to write me directly at anytime at jwhite@codeweavers.com.

With this first post, I wanted to start with a look back, and share my story and the story of how CodeWeavers began our mission.

I have always been a self-confessed computer geek; my passion for programming and computers started as I'd crouch at the Radio Shack typing out programs on a TRS-80. It blossomed as I worked on a wide range of diverse and interesting computer systems. In the 90's, I was distressed by the rise of Windows as the dominant operating system. Not so much because I felt that Windows was so bad, but more because its monopoly position was sucking all the fun out of computing.

Imagine if you will for a moment a car afficianado who is told that the only car anyone will be allowed to drive is a Buick Riviera. Nothing particularly wrong with a Buick, but wouldn't it be nice to take a Corvette out once in a while? That's how I feel.

I founded CodeWeavers in May of 1996. I wanted to do technically challenging work and work with great people. In 1997 I discovered - and then fell in love with - the Wine Project. I was captivated by the idea that Wine could remove the Applications Barrier to Entry and thus make it possible for people to use any operating system they wanted. And it was such an audacious and impossible task that I couldn't help but be enchanted.

And so in 1999 I reinvented CodeWeavers to focus on the Wine project. We were fortunate to have Alexandre Julliard, Wine's leader, join us, and he was followed by many of the veteran Wine contributors.

Since 1999, then, we have worked long and hard to fulfill the promise of Wine - to make Unix-like operating systems into fully Windows compatible systems.

We started in 2000 with a shot of venture capital that let us explore a variety of business plans. Then in 2002, we launched the first version of CrossOver Office, which was the basis for all of our CrossOver products. Luckily, CrossOver was a success (especially since the venture capital had run out :-/),and we have been able to survive and thrive on the income we get from CrossOver ever since. I remain grateful to each and every person that buys a copy of CrossOver and thereby enables us to keep on doing the work we do on Wine each day.

I am deeply proud of what we've accomplished - Microsoft Office and many other productivity applications run cleanly in Wine. Many games and demanding multimedia appications work well in Wine. And every day Wine supports just a little bit more; every day I get a report from someone that their favorite application "just works". Further, I'm also deeply proud that we've been able to do this, all the while supporting the Wine Project and Free Software by contributing all of our Wine work back to the Wine project. I'm tickled when I see someone has been able to use our work in some creative and powerful way - that is the power of Free Software, and I'm thrilled that we've been able to contribute so much.

Finally, I'm most excited that all of our hard work means that Wine is on the verge of being declared '1.0'. That is, Wine is nearly good enough to start people thinking that they don't have to buy Windows to run their favorite Windows program, and that perhaps they don't have to buy a Windows PC at all.

I can't help but hope that, in some small way, we are contributing to the greater diversity, vibrancy, and overall joy in the computing world.

That is why I am here, and that is what I fight for every day.

Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for my next entry, when I sketch out our road map for 2008.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(0 Comments)