Just went to the Transgaming (WineX) site to look up some data for a question on this site, and I found a (redesigned) website with the following:

Blah blah blah.... but there was also this:

All of which is "fine"... (if alarming), but I actually had to go to Google (!!!) to find the Games search page (which I use as the tips in the game forums often are useful for a Wine install as well), and the accumulated impression I get from those three occurrences is that WineX-- excuse me, Cedega-- is well along in its process of locking itself down, locking us (CVS users) out, and disassociating itself from the OSS community (and Wine) in general.

Again, possibly well within their rights, and most likely logical, but really seems ugly on the whole (especially that Linspire thing; do CNR users get a subscription with the install? Or do they not need one? Very curious about that).

Anyway, not wanting a whole lot of "WineX sucks!" posts, the usual flame war, or "you shouldn't be using Wine(X) in the first place!" posts (not that I won't get that anyway), but if anyone could enlighten me in a reasoned manner with any further information (what is the effect of these changes on current subscribers, if any, for instance), and how this impacts the main segment of the community (if in fact it does), I'd like to hear your thoughts.

One of the reasons prepackaged versions of WineX, excuse me, Cedega are not freely available is because some parts of it are not freely available and must be licensed by Transgaming (most of the stuff with installers). The parts that are GPLed are available through www.transgaming.org and can be built. However, this is difficult and I've never gotten it to work.

The name change shouldn't affect subscriber at all. Hopefully they'll change more than the name, like making actual Slackware packages instead of using Alien.

The thing with Linspire is kind of old, but it means CNR users do get to download WineX (dang it! Cedega). However, they might not be able to get Point2Play out of it so using a CLI Cedega might be out of the skills of an average Linspire user.

Kind of old? Two months? It's since the Lindows=>Lin___s=>Linspire name change, so to me that's not so terribly old, but OK.

I understand about the GPL/CVS stuff, but as many of us have experienced, it's been getting harder and harder to even get the (dead old and half-broken) CVS (not allowed to be packaged by Debian, ebuild to fetch and compile it force-removed from Gentoo Portage, etc).

At this moment I can't even get to a download page (when formerly you could get to a page that described CVS and gave some commands for accessing it, even if you were not a subscriber). This may be a bug in the new site, but it seems that a lot of navigation options are not available if you don't log in first, and if you are not logged in as a subscriber, you only get "sales brochure" info (as I said, I couldn't even find the game forums to view them as I was previously able to do).

There is, of course, no mention of CVS access any longer in the information I have been able to view (not that CVS access is all that useful, but in some ways it offers a slight advantage over Wine at times-- though this may not last much longer).

In any case, a new user who wanted to use WineX CVS would not have a clue how to do so (which clue was previously available from Transgaming itself), and I question whether CVS access remains available at all (haven't tried it).

And that's what I'm asking about, I guess-- from even a cursory "glance", the changes seem very sweeping, and seem to have some very far-reaching implications for the CVS user, which in turn has far-reaching implications for the licensing issues that WineX has always struggled with.

My feeling is that the name change has more than cosmetic value; if "formerly WineX" is now a different program (Cedega) it may have a completely different license, which does not require providing CVS access at all, for example.

I won't get to see any new license until such time as I subscribe, but I am not necessarily willing to subscribe without seeing the license, and I would very much like to know what's going on "behind the scenes" here, as there seems to be quite a lot.

Ill stick with the free winex binaries I find on the web.... and latly I have gotten to the point were i do not bother buying anygames that do not have native linux support. However I still have some old ones that I like and will continue to use winex with as long as I have an urge to play it (Warcraft II, Max Payne, GTA3, etc...)

But that's the thing; if the CVS (for what good it was) is no longer available due to whatever may be happening at Transgaming, how long will you still be able to get/use free winex binaries currently available on the Web?

And if you had just bought FarCry and then switched to Linux, you might well be unable to find an alternative to subscribing if you wanted to still play it.

But I'd still like to know if there even is an alternative, and if the license still requires it.

WineX can still be downloaded via CVS, but I havn't had any success in installing it, but I'm plugging away at it yet again, hoping to somehow get it to work with Slackware. I had a hard time finding the CVS download, and I figured it would have to still be online, since even if they changed licenses, there would still be one version of WineX that would require them releasing the code. Anywho, i had to go to frankscorner.org and that led me back to the licensing page on TransGaming's website, which is:

http://www.transgaming.com/license.php?source=1

If anyone can successfully install this, though, be sure to let me know! I'm really baffled why it never creates a system32 directory in the windows directory, or why there's barely anything in the windows directory compared to regular Wine!