The FLOSS ethos and the morality of Cedega

[Naib]

OMG!!! it is has gotten worse then when I last looked

just look at the number of games the Cedega has "brought" to Mac
A Mac user just has to pay for the game and it comes with needed cedega files to work

BUT a linux user has to buy the game and then "licence" Cedega, if they stop paying, they stop playing

Cedega is just milking linux users!

Warhammer OnlineTransGaming's Cider Brings Warhammer Online to Mac
TransGaming brings Tale of Tales new game to the Mac
Freaky CreaturesTransGaming Brings Abandon Interactive's Freaky Creatures To Mac
Ubisoft Announces New Mac TitlesUbisoft? Announces New Mac Titles (plural!!!!)
City of HeroesCity of Heroes Now Available for the Mac
TransGaming Enables BioWare's Jade Empire: Special Edition for the Mac


its discusting

[Naib]

Thing is when Cedega kicked off (before WINE went gpl) it really was the only sol'n to windows-gaming in linux.

They marketed it well. With the promise of porting back their code to wine. A promise that never came...
Not only that with time it became VERY apparent that Cedega was only going todo hot fixes to get the top games working. If your game no longer was top of the list they didn't bother fixing their code to repair what broke.

Likewise when WINE went GPL they actually started making more progress


But what really pissed me off was they were taking Linux users good money and then investing it into OSX work such that OSX could get Spore...
makes me sick !

[a7v-user]

IMO Wine develops a lot faster then Cedega. Cedega just had a head start and focus on getting only a handful of features/games working. It's not that I dislike Transgaming that much (although they did get lots of stuff for free), they're just a bunch of people making a living and they do give back some patches to Wine occasionally.

When it comes to getting games working in Linux I prefer the open-source model of Wine though. Being able to help out and try some community patches can be really fun not to mention a lot faster then waiting on Transgaming employees. They'd have to get it scheduled and approved, then someone has to run out and buy the game before they can start on it. I've heard they had some TG Beta program running now though, but to me that feels a lot like donating my work/time while they make money from it.

[Dragonlord]

There's a huge difference between the two. Cedega managed to get games working... but only THESE games. Wine is about making a general solution. Hence Cedega specialices on some games to make them run with game specific hacks but this is totally unsuitable for Wine as they do not want specific hacks but make a complete emulation. In this regard support Wine if you want to support any of the two since Cedega is a shitty bunch of single game hacks and not worth a dime in the end.

[RealNC]

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

Yes, but how long did it take them? Years. The games I can now play fine in Wine were playable in Cedega years ago. Now they're old anyway

[djack]

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

Or at least equally as good.

I used top be a Cedega subscriber (there - I admit it.. I feel much better now for getting that into the open). They consistently failed to get the games I wanted (mainly Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Planescape) working or make any visible progress into making them work.

The rift between them and Wine was one thing. To my mind, they didn't seem that bothered about pushing Windows gaming. They have 'ported' several games over to Mac using their version of winelib yet aside from The Sims (I think - correct me if I'm wrong pls) they haven't bothered doing anything like that on the Linux side to show Linux market potential.

[Zhick]

Well, they seem to submit code to Wine, even though they are not obliged to do it.

From what I've gathered they pretty much stopped submitting code to wine when they changed their licence to the lgpl, and only recently started to do so again because they integrated some of wines lgpl'ed parts into Cedega again and thus were very much obliged to submit changes to those parts again (well, they don't need to submit them back, but to release them as well as lgpl):

TransGaming contributes any substantive changes to LGPL covered code to the Wine project (http://www.winehq.org), via the wine-devel and wine-patches mailing lists.

And, after all, the Wine developers could do the same what the Cedega developers do.

CrossOver anyone?

No one is holding them back. The difference is that Cedega's devs get paid. Perhaps that's why they do a better job Money is good for software. Not always. But most of the time.

From what I've heard most people say wine/CrossOver actually seems to work better than Cedega for them.

[RealNC]

Have shares in Cedega do we?

Nope

Seriously though, I was commenting of the morality of a commercial enterprise profiting from community donated code, not on the evils of capitalism in general (That would be a whole other post ).

Well, they seem to submit code to Wine, even though they are not obliged to do it. And, after all, the Wine developers could do the same what the Cedega developers do. No one is holding them back. The difference is that Cedega's devs get paid. Perhaps that's why they do a better job

Money is good for software. Not always. But most of the time.

[Inversius]

At least we can sleep at night knowing that we dont sink to such levels. Well. I cant, Im a frigin hellspawn.

Hey, this has nothing to do with my own morality - I'm only comfortable commenting on the morality of others

[Inversius]

They should make a law against Cedega and also declare all our assets as public property and rename the country to Soviet States of America.

Have shares in Cedega do we?

Seriously though, I was commenting of the morality of a commercial enterprise profiting from community donated code, not on the evils of capitalism in general (That would be a whole other post ).

BTW Which country should we change the name of? This is an international community; I'm writing from Australia and the man himself comes from Finland for goodness sake