Whisky Developer Halts Work on Mac Gaming Tool, Endorses CrossOver

[MacRumors]

Whisky, a popular open-source front-end for Wine that made Windows gaming on Mac more accessible, has ceased development. The project's 18-year-old creator, Isaac Marovitz, announced the shutdown and encouraged users to switch to the paid CrossOver app instead.

In offering the reasons for his decision, Marovitz expressed concern that Whisky was potentially harming the Wine ecosystem by competing with CrossOver, a commercial product from CodeWeavers that helps fund Wine development.

"Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," he wrote on the project's website. He said that Whisky contributed "practically zero" to Wine development while potentially threatening CrossOver's financial viability.

Marovitz is also a full-time student currently attending Northeastern University, and so he has had to balance the increasing demands of the project with his academic responsibilities. "I lost interest in the project," he admitted. "And as I'm still a student and also not being paid for work on Whisky, it becomes hard to justify working on it if I no longer enjoy it." He said that occasional updates to Whisky may still come if macOS "fundamentally breaks the main app," which happened with macOS Sequoia 15.4.

Writing on the Codeweavers blog, CEO James B. Ramey said in response that he appreciated Marovitz's work. "We 'tip our cap' to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming," Ramey wrote, acknowledging that Whisky, like CrossOver, was "a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices."

During its run, Whisky gained popularity for its user-friendly interface that simplified running Windows games on macOS. The project highlighted the potential of Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit, which is based on the same Wine technology that powered both Whisky and CrossOver.

Despite stepping away from Whisky, Marovitz told Ars Technica he isn't done with Mac gaming: "Right now I'm working on the recompilation of Sonic Unleashed and bringing it fully to Mac."

Article Link: Whisky Developer Halts Work on Mac Gaming Tool, Endorses CrossOver

 

[ItchyRat2160]

Quite admirable to see someone in tech look at their product and say "This is doing more harm than good, so I think I'll stop". I've got a few games running using Kegworks & Wine. Only thing I will say is I hate the user interface of CrossOver and find it to be far more confusing and difficult to use than Wine/Kegworks etc.

 

[SanderEvers]

So basically CodeWeavers asked him nicely to stop development.

 

[iPhoneFan5349]

So basically CodeWeavers asked him nicely to stop development.

They can’t do that though. What they can do is pay him to stop

 

[antiprotest]

Either this is poor reasoning or there is something fishy going on. The proper way is for CrossOver to differentiate with better features and design for people to pay for it. Now there is even less incentive to do so. Losing interest and being too busy with school are more realistic reasons, but then he could just hand the project off to someone else. The thing is, maybe someone else, whether connected to him or not, might just do something like it, and then the "harming Wine" situation will become the same again. Thus I do not accept the primary explanation -- not that he is lying, but that it doesn't make enough sense. It's pretty silly. The better scenario is that paid products should just be better.

 

[kirbyrun]

Either this is poor reasoning or there is something fishy going on. The proper way is for CrossOver to differentiate with better features and design for people to pay for it. Now there is even less incentive to do so. Losing interest and being too busy with school are more realistic reasons, but then he could just hand the project off to someone else. The thing is, maybe someone else, whether connected to him or not, might just do something like it, and then the "harming Wine" situation will become the same again. Thus I do not accept the primary explanation -- not that he is lying, but that it doesn't make enough sense. It's pretty silly. The better scenario is that paid products should just be better.

The developer in question is a college student. I don't think it's "fishy" that a college student made a decision that doesn't measure up to a coldly analytical capitalist market-driven argument.

 

[xander49x]

This sounds fishy to me, I understand that he lost interest in whisky but to endorse crossover, I wonder how much money was involved or pressure was involved.

 

[antiprotest]

The developer in question is a college student. I don't think it's "fishy" that a college student made a decision that doesn't measure up to a coldly analytical capitalist market-driven argument.

If there is nothing fishy, then it's "poor reasoning," as I said.

 

[antiprotest]

This sounds fishy to me, I understand that he lost interest in whisky but to endorse crossover, I wonder how much money was involved or pressure was involved.

Someone above suggests that it can't be anything fishy because he is just a college student and is incapable of basic capitalist reasoning. The guy is just a selfless hero in this cruel capitalistic world. 🤷‍♂️ 😢

 

[Wx_Man]

Occam’s Razor applies here.

Development takes time. Every human who has existed and will ever exist has a limited amount of time. That time must be managed for all tasks that need to be fulfilled and desired to be fulfilled.

His main time and focus should be on his studies. Now it could be that his studies are in Comp. Sci. so a hand waving argument could be made that his hobby project is beneficial to that from an operational standpoint. But that is still taking time away from the main purpose he’s at university.

Also he’s seems to have the right attitude when it comes to Open Source development. He admits straight up that he never really gave back to the Wine Community and that his free program took people away from possibly buying a Crossover license which funds the very company that supports Wine development the most. Like….it’s not even close. Which means Wine would be NO where near the state that it is in for Linux and MacOS users today if it weren’t for Codeweavers as a for profit company providing the bulk of Wine development. This shows an altruistic mindset which is actually the foundation of Open Source thinking and development.

And no….there is no need for conspiracy theories about Codeweavers perhaps soft pressuring the guy. There have been numerous free and open source front ends to Wine for years without pressure from Codeweavers. As a matter of fact I am using, as we speak, a lovely Wine front end called “Bottles” on my Linux computer. Built on GTK 3 for Linux, so it meshes nicely with the Gnome GUI as found in Fedora and Ubuntu, I’ve been using it for years. Before that it was “PlayOnLinux” which also offered a nicer interface than Crossover at the time but sadly now seems to be abandonware which is why I moved to Bottles which has a much better and more native looking interface with Ubuntu.

 

[Jeaz]

Quite admirable to see someone in tech look at their product and say "This is doing more harm than good, so I think I'll stop". I've got a few games running using Kegworks & Wine. Only thing I will say is I hate the user interface of CrossOver and find it to be far more confusing and difficult to use than Wine/Kegworks etc.

Yeah, I really hate the user experience with CrossOver as well, nor do I like how they interact with me as a customer. But I appreciate the support they bring to the Wine project. I just wish they did a better job of making me prefer them over the alternatives.

 

[contacos]

Wine 🍷 and whiskey 🥃

I was so confused for a second. Actually … let me still Google it 😅

 

[walterpaisley]

Sometimes things are just how they are. This particular developer has contributed a ton of stuff to the Mac/Apple community, so it's not that surprising they might decide it's time to move on. For anyone who's never worked on a very popular passion project for free, it can be gruelling and exhausting. There's always a cost.

 

[uacd]

In offering the reasons for his decision, Marovitz expressed concern that Whisky was potentially harming the Wine ecosystem by competing with CrossOver

Wow! Sounds like surrender. But I don’t blame the guy, he probably got nice dividends from CodeWeavers for this decision, or maybe he just lost interest in gaming, many do at some point.

Tho all this “harming ecosystem” a bit anti-capitalist to me😄 Not the best way to communicate the decision to stop development

 

[uacd]

Wine 🍷 and whiskey 🥃

I was so confused for a second. Actually … let me still Google it 😅

Yeah, and all that stuff “brews”, “ferments”, “bottles” and whatever other stuff fellow Windows migrants have invented🤣

Last time I tried Wine to run some game my MacBook nearly exploded, it became very hot and I guess throttled in a second, and device isn’t very old. Probably all this virtualization uses enormous processing power to do things, maybe even dangerous for machine

 

[newJeans]

a little bit strange that codeweavers wrote a blog post about this but i don't think it's that deep. it would be great to see some UX improvements from crossover though.

 

[LoveToMacRumors]

Which serious gamer games on mac

 

[frozencarbonite]

College kid making an idiotic decision. Checks out. I bet he's getting paid to stop developing it.

"I want to make sure people have to spend $74 a year or $450 lifetime for an app that I was going to allow them to do for free."

Thankful that many other app developers don't think like this.

 

[somnolentsurfer]

Wishful thinking, but it would be great if Valve hired this guy to fix the Mac version of Steam and get Proton working on Mac.

 

[Mousse]

What a dummy! I bet he's getting paid to stop developing it.

Can you blame the guy? Let's look at the pros and cons of stop working on Whiskey.

Pros
more time for other stuff
$$$, maybe
less stress

Cons
a huge time sink
no $$$
having to expend resources
lose out on the learning about the continuing changes in OSX

Getting paid not to work; that's the American dream.🤠

 

[decimortis]

Which serious gamer games on mac

Serious gamer, lol. Perhaps someone makes their living on their Mac and wouldn't mind the occasional escape with a game not native to MacOS.

 

[silvertech]

So we lost a free product for a paid product.

 

[TruthAboveAllElse]

If this made sense then the purpose of open source development is to provide code for for-profit developers. That’s just ridiculous. The point is that it’s available for anyone to use.

 

[CapitalIdea]

Either this is poor reasoning or there is something fishy going on. The proper way is for CrossOver to differentiate with better features and design for people to pay for it. Now there is even less incentive to do so. Losing interest and being too busy with school are more realistic reasons, but then he could just hand the project off to someone else. The thing is, maybe someone else, whether connected to him or not, might just do something like it, and then the "harming Wine" situation will become the same again. Thus I do not accept the primary explanation -- not that he is lying, but that it doesn't make enough sense. It's pretty silly. The better scenario is that paid products should just be better.

I doubt he cares whether or not you accept his explanation. He wasn’t paid for it, he doesn’t owe anyone anything. Even saying anything at all was a courtesy.

 

[Pezimak]

Basically either CodeWeavers asked him to stop of face being sued, or he is being paid handsomely by CodeWeavers to stop. Either way I doubt VERY much he has stopped developing it out of the goodness of his heart or for the community...