CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi,

there seem to be a rumor about Cedega changing their business model and going fully OSS, while making users pay for access to the game database. It doesn't seem to be finalized yet, but I'm wondering how it could affect Wine and CrossOver Games. Is code merging plausible, or have the 2 systems evolved radically different ? And would CO Games still be relevant if Cedega is OSS and free for use ?

Not trying to troll, just wondering if you guys knew about this rumour and if you had plans for it ?

Alban

I haven't heard about it. Got a link with more details?

I doubt that TG will release their closed source parts anytime soon. They have investors who don't like the idea, and it does not really fit their business model. Big parts of Cedega are Open Source under the LGPL already though - the non-D3D DLLs which come from Wine.

If, hypothetically, the whole cedega Wine tree was LGPL tomorrow that would not change much for Wine I think. We have a pretty solid D3D code, and pretty solid Dsound support. It may have advantages and disadvantages over TG's code, but a merge doesn't make sense because there is no common codebase the D3D support originated from.

Where Wine could use some of TGs code is DirectPlay and D3DX. Transgaming made their Dplay code LGPL to contribute it to Wine, but there were issues with the code and nobody was willing to integrate it into Wine. The "problem" with dplay is that native dplay.dll works just fine, so there is no big incentive to work on our own. The main(and probably only) reason why we'd want our own dplay is if CodeWeavers would port a game that needs dplay to Linux or Mac. In this case we would not be allowed to ship native dplay. So far we didn't port a game using dplay though.

D3DX is a different story. Native d3dx works fine too, and CrossOver uses the native DLL by just letting the game install the DirectX runtime. That's again not possible for a CrossOver port due to license reasons. You're allowed to install the DX runtime, but you're not allowed to ship it with a Linux or Mac game.

However, I met Gavriel State(TG's CTO) 2 days ago on WWDC, and he said he doesn't see their D3DX code going open source anytime soon. So I doubt this rumor is true.
(Besides that their d3dx code uses proprietary code from Nvidia - NV's CG shader compiler)

Hi Stefan,

my sources are from this thread on Mandriva's forums :

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=112627&sid=7e3ca1bb78791f0bad05664802d79a7e

An official from MDV says :
"Regarding games, we are waiting for Cedega now. They are changing at the moment their economic model. They should announce Cedega moving to open source license and they will earn money on monthly registration to access their games database. So we are waiting further information."

It's pretty thin on the details, but I guess since Mandriva has a partnership going on since several years they might have some reliable sources themselves. It's likely, however, that Mandriva probably wasn't supposed to say anything about it.

Anyway, thanks for the insight, it's an interesting read ! Well if the rumor happened to be true, I guess many would be happy to see more people working on the same goal together rather than competing :)

Alban