Porting The Application

The Tires have been Kicked. The major issues are known. (Well, probably not, but we've all done the best we can, and you've got a schedule to meet, so it's time to get going...) Now comes the hard work of making the application actually run in a commercially acceptable fashion. In practice, this means debugging Wine so that the application runs correctly. In rare cases, we work with software manufacturers to tweak their source code such that their app will run better under Wine. But 99% of the time, your code doesn't get touched, and we're doing the work on our end to fix Wine.

Fixing Wine is hard. We're essentially replicating the functionality of a gigantic, black-box API (Win32), which has practically zero documentation (funny, Microsoft seems to like it that way), and implementing it on a different operating system to boot. Piece of cake. Climbing Mt. Everest in a wet suit and scuba flippers is probably about as much fun, and might even be a bit easier. Don't get me wrong; we live for fixing Wine. We really do. But it's not a trivial undertaking. And as such, it can be expensive.

Costs for these engagements run the gamut, depending on 1) the complexity of your application, and 2) the required level of support for the various features of the application (i.e., how perfectly does it have to run?) More Complex + Greater Need for Perfection = More Money; simple as that. We have a rough working metric that each bug in Wine costs us between $1,000 and $1,500 to fix. And getting an app to run well can comprise quite a few bugs.

Does CodeWeavers work in free Wine as well as CrossOver?

Sure. We prefer to use CrossOver, because we think that if you're trying to sell your application into a commercial software environment, CrossOver is a more stable, tested platform, with better management features, than free Wine. But if you have your heart set on Wine, we can do that. Just be aware, though, that taking that path can complicate ongoing support.

Does the Wine work on my application get returned to the Wine Project?

Absolutely. All the work we do on Wine in CrossOver gets returned to the Wine Project, per the LGPL license that governs Wine. So rest assured that the money you spend with CodeWeavers directly and positively impacts the open-source community as a whole, and makes Wine better for everyone in the process.

If you're interested in CrossOver porting services, please send an email to sales@codeweavers.com or call James Ramey, VP Sales, at 651-523-9302.