CrossOver Port

An increasing number of Independent Software Vendors and other application owners are looking for ways to reach the Mac or Linux markets. CrossOver and Wine are excellent tools for accomplishing this quickly and cost effectively.

There are several ways you can use CrossOver and Wine to bring your application to new markets. First, with Winelib, you can essentially just recompile your application against Wine (instead of Microsoft Visual C++), and the end result is a working Unix binary (note that this includes Linux, Solaris, or Macintosh OS X, in addition to others).

Second, you can elect to simply make your application run properly with the standard Wine binary loader. Although this choice somehow seems 'wrong' to many of our customers, the reality is that the end user cannot tell the difference between a 'true' Winelib port, and a solution that uses the Wine binary loader.

Further, by licensing CrossOver, you can arrange to deliver your application within an installation and support framework that assures it will work on a broad array of Linux distributions as well as on Intel Mac OS X systems.

The word "port" is itself something of a misnomer in this case. Getting an application to run under CrossOver Wine doesn't require any re-writing of the application itself. Instead, Wine is improved such that the application will run. The result is a more robust Wine that is capable of running the application in a production environment.

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 and/or Better Certification = More Money; simple as that.