According to this article, James Ramey, President of Codeweavers, says a ton of interesting stuff and he does mention GOG when he says that "(...) we do not have a direct partnership yet. I believe we will be affiliated with them fairly shortly, but we are supporting some of their games that do work inside crossover, and we have supported a number of games in their catalogue for years. At one point in time GOG was buying Crossover from us and reselling our product to run specific games on Linux and Mac as well. We have a good relationship with GOG, Bigfish and other companies out there, trying to expand their user base outside of Windows games and open up their offer to Mac and Linux users as well."

Worth a read. I really admire the Codeweavers group and Crossover. The more oldies, the merrier!

Finally.

Better be careful with the use of "Good news" around here ;)

Is Codeweavers still leeching off of Wine and not contributing back? If so, I don't know that this is fully "good" news.

Why is that? I'm kinda out of these polemic issues ;)

edit: ninja'd by "good news" already :D Well, it sounds like good news to me. It means, imho, games ready to play, no hassles. That's what we all want, right? :P

Not if comes via an unethical company that GOG should not be doing business with. If Codeweavers is still basically repackaging Wine and selling it without contributing any code or financial assistance back to the project, they should not be supported by us or GOG, even if it means we have to wait a little longer to get what we want.

https://www.codeweavers.com/about/support_wine/

Good to know. With that I would still say this isn't good news, it's great news!

Now that's better, eh? :P
I guess the GOG Linux catalog will expand greatly after that.

Interesting read and he does make a few valid points. Wine has come very far in recent years and it's a viable gaming solution today. On the other hand I kinda understand those who want native ports, maybe they expect to be treated the same way Windows gamers do.

I prefer native ports myself but if there's no other alternative I won't complain about Wine, it enables me to play the games I enjoyed on Windows while using Linux as my only OS, a Win-Win situation.

That never happened.

Codeweavers is essentially a funding vehicle for WINE development. They sell packaged copies of WINE with some amount of "value add" in the installation and setup tools. This allows the Codeweavers hackers to have a day job that they spend improving WINE.

This makes WINE + Codeweavers sort of an "open core" play, which some may criticise. However, they're pretty careful to keep all the actual software&game running technology in WINE itself so that it's available as pure Open Source / Free Software.

Most likely you are thinking of the story with WineX/ Cedega / TransGaming / Cider, which was the instigation of the relicensing of WINE. TransGaming Inc took the open source WINE and began to add to it privately in their own repository. Over time it became increasingly apparent that TransGaming had no intention of ever contributing back to the WINE project which led to the WINE project changing the license to LGPL to prevent this kind of non-contributory use of their code. TransGaming has ceased all support of Linux some time back, because they decided it wasn't profitable enough.

As an aside, I've played a few Cider-based games on my Macbook Pro. The experience is poor as compared to Crossover Games.

In many ways, native ports are *cheaper* than solutions such as WINE. The engineering effort is likely smaller. The time to market is shorter. The support load is lower.

And the quality is higher.

The only real advantage to compatibility layer approaches like this is if you can make it someone else's problem, and if that actually makes sense. For example, if you believe you can save half the development effort by making your game Windows-only, and that giving it to a third-party shop to make it work on Linux & Mac, it will let you work on your next game. It could be a business win.

However, the comparison with native ports I think misses two important concepts.

1 - WINE is not an emulator. Yes I know many people find this point academic, but it remains true. WINE isn't simulating hardware, it's just implementing an API. Among other things, this means that as a developer, you can compile WINE into your software as a library to handle the windows-specific code that's too expensive to re-write. And at the same time, you can replace the parts that matter to the user experience. For example, you could use WINE for the graphics stack, but yet perform file management or network access via native logic. This means that a game "ported" with WINE can feel much more native than a windows executable launched under the WINE runtime.

2 - GOG is selling a lot of old games. These games may not even have source code anymore. Even those that do it may not be a plausible engineering cost to do the porting work now even if the companies wanted to, after those teams have moved on to other work. The big win here, obviously, is to get all the games from the later 1990s and the 2000s that run on windows to run on Mac & Linux. But also some older Windows games run very poorly on modern versions of Windows. WINE can help with that too.

You may be correct. It's been years since I've delved into Wine and its variants and age does tend to mess with the memory.

...
"may be"

Isn't it a Lin-Win situation? :)