CodeWeavers
Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | Saint Paul, Minnesota , United States |
Key people |
|
| Products |
|
Number of employees | 45+ |
| Website | www.codeweavers.com |
CodeWeavers is a private American corporation that develops the Wine Windows API re-implementation. Wine is a free software product licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1 license. There is not much money in that, so the CodeWeavers corporation sells a commercial product based on Wine called CrossOver to corporations who want Wine with a support arrangement. They are also offering coding services under the brands "PortJump" and "ExecMode".
Wine and CrossOver[edit]
Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is a complete re-implementation of the Windows APIs using standard POSIX calls. It can be used to run Windows software on GNU/Linux, Windows and x86-based ChromeOS machines (you can't use Wine to run Windows applications on ARM, it's not an emulator). The CodeWeavers corporation will sometimes say silly things like "Wine is a community project. It's not, it's a free CodeWeavers product. These were the top 10 contributors to Wine 6.8:
That Wine is, in reality, a Codeweavers developed and controlled product isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Codeweavers corporation makes it's money by selling a proprietary commercial Wine version called "CrossOver". It's actually not a bleeding edge Wine version with features Wine users don't get, it's a stable Wine version suitable for corporate customers. Wine is in practice a rolling CrossOver beta-version.
To put the relationship between the not community CrossOver version called Wine in some context: Wine's release manager Alexandre Julliard just happens to be Codeweavers' CTO. They are in charge. Alexandre Julliard tends to be the largest contributor to new Wine releases, and almost all the other contributors tend to be CodeWeavers employees. It is fair to say that it is overall a good thing that Wine is a Codeweavers-controlled product.
PortJump and ExecMode[edit]
PortJump is a porting service mostly built around Wine. You can pay the CodeWeavers corporation to port software from one platform to another. The CodeWeavers corporation describes the PortJump service as:
"CodeWeavers porting technology enables you to bring your Windows software to the macOS, Linux and Chrome OS marketplace efficiently and economically. Because no source code changes are required, you won't have the hassle of maintaining two code bases."
The PortJump marketing about "no source code changes" is slightly misleading. What they mean is that they will leave the clients Windows program alone and make any code changes to Wine that would be required to make the software run under Wine. It's probably a good service if you have some piece of Windows software you'd like to make available to macOS or GNU/Linux users.
ExecMode is a general marketing term the CodeWeavers corporation uses for it's general consulting services. They were marketing this service in May 2021 using the slogan:
"We’re damn good at solving hard technical problems."
We can't speak to their general ability to solve "hard technical problems". What we can say is that the Wine source code indicates that it's mostly true as far as technical problems that can be solved purely by writing computer code goes. We wouldn't trust them to adjust a CNC machine or anything like that, though.
Links[edit]
- CodeWeavers Website: https://www.codeweavers.com/
- List of CodeWeavers assets w/pictures: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/people
- Their "ExecMode" service: https://www.codeweavers.com/execmode
- Their "PortJump" service: https://www.codeweavers.com/portjump
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