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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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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