I don't know why, but for some reason I decided to take advantage of the 60 day free trial of Codeweaver's Crossover. It's not like I really have any Windows applications that I need to use, with the exception of Microsoft Office I suppose. I guess I was just pretty bored and needed something to do I am pretty impressed with Crossover. It's very easy to install and configure and it even adds KDE and GNOME menu entries. Installing Office XP was easy as pie but I couldn't apply Service Pack 3 for some unknown reason. Word and Powerpoint function brilliantly, but Excel is non-working right now. Haven't really had the time to figure out why yet. The installation of Internet Explorer 6 went very smoothly as well. I don't plan on using the browser if I can help it, but even in this day and age I still come across websites that demand it I plan to install a few Windows games later and see how they perform. Cedega would probably be more suitable but I don't want to support them. They are just riding the OSS wave and making money out of it - without giving anything back. At least Codeweavers contribute all of their patches back to WINE.
Transgaming close-sourced their own flavor of WINE (WineX at the time, now called Cedega), as WINE was originally released under the BSD license. While prerfectly legal, that pissed off the WINE folks, so they decided on a license change to LGPL. If they had started out with that license, things might have gone a lot differently. So while I'd like to see a lot more upstream participation from Transgaming, what they did fit perfectly with the spirit of the BSD license.
