Miss what ? Where is the proof that Crossover Office violates LGPL ?

Maybe CrossOver does NOT modify Wine code, it just calls it's functions or subclasses it? I'd say that making a subclass of a class in a library is not modifying the library, and is often required to be able to use the library, and the whole point of the LGPL it to allow proprietary programs to use the library.

Kenny, I do not understand how you have come to the conclusions you have reached. The heart and soul of CrossOver is Wine; Wine is LGPL and we are the single largest contributor to Wine. All of the work we do on Wine is contributed to the public Wine tree first, and we provide full source code for all versions of Wine we use.

The relatively modest parts of CrossOver that are proprietary are now almost all written in Python, with some Perl and Bash thrown in for good measure. Given that Wine is entirely in C language, I'm afraid it is literally impossible for us to do what you suggest.

Further, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what CrossOver does. CrossOver is a tool to help you run Wine. It is not an extension of or a growth of Wine. It provides convenient tools for managing a Wine prefix (aka 'bottle'), and convenient tools for knowing what combinations of things work well in Wine, and nice tools to make menus appear. But, in the end, it's just a nice tool for running Wine.

Finally, there is no need to take my word for this. CrossOver, given it's nature, lends itself quite readily to analysis. Any moderately experienced programmer could study it and fairly quickly come to understand how it's put together, and any violations of the license of Wine would be easy to spot. Note that we've been shipping for over 8 years, and the only license issue anyone has reported in that time is that I no longer drive a Beige Honda Minivan... :-).

Cheers,

Jeremy

This is a bit unrelated, but you said that CrossOver is just a tool to run Wine. OTOH I heard that CrossOver runs more Windows programs than Wine. Is that true?

Okay, can we just get back on topic? Apparently, if CrossOver is the largest contributor to Wine then maybe CO in every respect should exist. However, here's my question: How come CrossOver supports more Windows apps than Wine and does not distribute the app support back to the Wine community?

One shouldn't have too high expectations in this case .

3 points:

First, if I am not mistaken, there is a lot of tweaking that one can / must do to get certain things to run with WINE. As a minimum, I imagine this includes installing specific DLLs. CrossOver maybe does some of the tweaking for you.

Second, what is your basis for claiming that Codeweavers does not give back to the community (including the WINE community)?

Third, why would you think that Codeweavers has any obligation to give a proprietary bit out for free?


Have you yet accepted that it is OK for someone to support an OpenSource app while simultaneously selling that same app with a proprietary wrapper that adds more functionality? Hint: If you do not accept this idea, then you are at odds with a very large number of software vendors, distro maintainers, and more.

My interpretation of this is that you now acknowledge that there is no license issue with CrossOver. If that is incorrect, then please contact me or any moderator privately.

Going forward, the message I take away is that the various OpenSource licenses can indeed be confusing and we all need to do our homework before asserting that someone is violating a license.

Thread closed.

Reopened after moderator peer review.

Kenny has stated in an e-mail that he now believes there is no license issue with Crossover.