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Whisky Developer Halts Work on Mac Gaming Tool, Endorses CrossOver

This is not worth all the coverage the tech press has given it. It was just a silly little hobby project that some kid decided to abandon. Whiskey was pretty useless anyway.

I can tell you CrossOver is not making a fortune from their product and is highly unlikely to be "paying off" this junior developer. If you think being a Mac App developer is a road to riches you are sadly mistaken. Crossover have been struggling for years, and their "product" aka Wine is still very unreliable.

In any event, the value of Wine/CrossOver is very questionable. If you want to run Windows productivity applications, then Parallels is an infinitely superior solution.

Apples Wine based porting toolkit is just a way for lazy game devs to jump start porting a game to the Mac. As everyone has found ( witness the slow rollout of ported games), it might get you 90% of the way there but that last 10% is a lot of work getting around the limitations/bugs of Wine and putting real MacOS code in there.
 
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loopy123 said:
In any event, the value of Wine/CrossOver is very questionable. If you want to run Windows productivity applications, then Parallels is an infinitely superior solution.

Apples Wine based porting toolkit is just a way for lazy game devs to jump start porting a game to the Mac. As everyone has found ( witness the slow rollout of ported games), it might get you 90% of the way there but that last 10% is a lot of work getting around the limitations/bugs of Wine and putting real MacOS code in there.
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There are significant advantages of running windows apps on Wine vs Parallels. First of all, Parallels is a virtual machine, so chops your hardware up into smaller allocated portions, meaning you don't get the full hardware capability of your Mac when you run Windows. There are also costs associated with paying for a parallels and windows licenses. It's good if you want to run an entire instance of Windows, but it's also quite limiting for some things. It also takes a long time to boot up just to run one windows app.

Wine is a translation layer that enables you to run Windows apps natively within MacOS. You can just create an app container for the app, install it, and launch straight from within macOS, using the full hardware capabilities of your Mac.

Of course, the downside is getting the app to work, and not all of them do. But not every app works in Parallels either due to license agreements etc.
 
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HQuest said:
Surprised CodeWeavers didn't offered him a position...
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They might in 4 years after he graduates.

Kid is 18. I don't blame him for this decision at all. I had no idea he was just a kid, he must have been 17 when he started working on it. I can't imagine the pressure of developing an app used by so many when you're 18 years old.

Crossover seems to work and work well, if r/macgaming is any indication. While I would prefer that developers made Mac-Native games, at least there is an option for Mac gamers.
 
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Reading this and having read how Apple is now serious-ish about gaming on Mac — why doesn’t Apple have this built into the OS? Or fund wine development at least.
 
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Patently untrue. As I said above I am currently using a Wine front end for Linux called Bottles for years. Previously I was using PlayOnLinux. Bottles is in active development now. In fact they are refactoring the entire interface from GTK to a combination of C# and Rust depending on whether it is the client side or the server side of the code base. I also use Crossover on my Mac. I am on their forums. No mention by Bottles or Codeweavers developers of harassment or pressure to stop the free and open source front end developers.
 
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iPhoneFan5349 said:
They can’t do that though. What they can do is pay him to stop
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Last time I checked you can ask a nobody to do just about anything that’s legal, including ending a voluntary project, with zero penalties and if they say “no” you’re free to make a (legal) counter-offer to compensate somebody for their time, or in this case, to walk away.

I’m sure he’s got a nice job lined up at Code Weavers if he wants one. Either that or they wrote him a nice check to “help” with tuition, board and “ other expenses”. 😜
 
ItchyRat2160 said:
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.
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Uh no. Crossover is a commercial application and Whiskey was open source alternative that was "free" and quite useful. This sounds more of corporate greed paying this guy a lump sum to stop working on his project because people are not buying the alternative.

Hopefully this event triggers other people to build a successor that continues this work again. This is a huge step back.
 
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MysteriousStain said:
Reading this and having read how Apple is now serious-ish about gaming on Mac — why doesn’t Apple have this built into the OS? Or fund wine development at least.
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Because they want Mac native games, preferably listed on the Mac App Store for the 30% cut. I too prefer it on the Mac App Store as I like getting the Game Center Achievements and family sharing / cross play on my other Apple devices.
 
munpip214 said:
Sounds just like Porting Kit which is also free. No need to use CrossOver unless you want the latest compatibility
www.portingkit.com

Porting Kit | Install Windows apps in Mac

With Porting Kit, you can install Windows games and apps on macOS easily using Wineskin technology!
www.portingkit.com www.portingkit.com
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Wow, hadn’t heard of this one yet. Free, and it looks like it’s actively updated.
 

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Wx_Man said:
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.
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With the exception of Bottles, which is a great utility, there weren't other tools in the past that did what Whiskey has been doing on macOS, and one that was as advanced as it was for macOS that is Open Source.

This is not a rag on Codeweavers but Open Source exists to offer an alternative to commercial software out there. And I can understand that to him, College is more important, but think about it if that were the case, why not rather find someone who wants to maintain the project... Instead he shuttered it down, this is what is off and it does look like Codeweavers gave him money to shut it down.

The only reason being Whiskey was the free alternative that was putting a dent into Codeweavers.

The only benefit here is that someone else can take the mantle or just make a new tool to take the place Whiskey had.
 
All he had to say was "hey I'm proud of this project, but I have a real life I need to get back to. Thanks for playing."
 
I am book marking this forum thread for the future. Anytime I read another negative thread and wonder why, or that maybe they have a valid point, I just have to reread this one to remind me some people are just... negative.

This is a simple story. Or have you all forgotten what it's like to be a kid? Kid has fun to impress others. Creates some code. Then gets bored and moves on. end. of. story. No conspiracy theories needed. No thinking he got paid off. He does something nice and gets Boo'd. Please. He doesnt have time to maintain it. Period. It's his baby, why should he give it to someone else to maintain for him? its not that easy to maintain someone else's code, or have you never coded? he probably figured it would still be a drain on his time if he even did try to hand it off. he is 18. going to school. end. of. story.

all this negativity... sad.
 
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CapitalIdea said:
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.
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Then he certainly doesn’t care about being defended.

He made a public statement. That means it’s open to public criticism.
 
Everyone who has made a claim previously or in the future while this thread is still open can very easily contact Isaac or Crossover for comment. If they say “No Comment” or if an “NDA” is mentioned, then yeah, perhaps money changed hands. But here is a clip of text from Ars Technica who interview Isaac that said…..

“ While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability."

People who are claiming that Codeweavers somehow paid off or threatened legal action for Isaac using the very same free and open source code base of Wine that Crossover does truly doesn’t understand FOSS or Open Source licensing and its legality.

Codeweavers couldn’t even claim “prior art” against the Isaac’s front end interface to Wine because A: You can’t claim prior art in a computer interface because now that’s like claiming prior art on the wheel. And B: Even if Codeweavers tried to bring prior art against Isaac the Whiskey interface is so different than Crossover’s interface as to make the point moot from a legal standpoint. Therefore prior art and copyright issues are null and void. And C: Whisky and Crossover’s code base are radically different.

So…GUIs are too common now for prior art to be of much use. Even if something is close to being a copy, if there are enough differences then prior art can’t stand and Whisky is WAY different from Crossover. And there is no stolen code from Crossover in Whisky. Therefore there was no payout or legal action taken by Codeweavers as none could taken and they would have been laughed out of court if they tried.

If you’re still in doubt, Google this legal case….”Codeweavers vs Valve”. You know….the case where Codeweavers is suing Valve over Proton.

I’ll be waiting…..
 
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Not to distract from the baseless negativity here, but I have a question for anyone who has tried Crossover. Is it good? Does it work 90% of the time? 50%? at all? Considering the same company made essentially made Proton for Valve, I assume it can't be too much worse, right?
 
AgeOfSpiracles said:
Not to distract from the baseless negativity here, but I have a question for anyone who has tried Crossover. Is it good? Does it work 90% of the time? 50%? at all? Considering the same company made essentially made Proton for Valve, I assume it can't be too much worse, right?
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There’s a free trial available and they have a database on their site with ratings of how stuff works, and the Apple Gaming Wiki site has some good stats too.

I’d always used Parallels until now, but it’s just not performant enough for recent stuff so I’d been experimenting with Whisky and Crossover. I’ve definitely seen stuff that has problems on Crossover that works well on Proton on Steam Deck. But I’ve also seen some stuff run that crashes on Deck. I guess bear in mind that Proton is converting to Vulcan, whereas Crossover increasingly needs to convert to Metal, which is closed source and much less well known. Integrating with Apple’s GPTK gave a big boost there, but even that is closed source so can’t be patched for specific games the way Wine is. Maybe we’ll get a version 3 at WWDC.
 
Vulkan said:
This is not a rag on Codeweavers but Open Source exists to offer an alternative to commercial software out there. And I can understand that to him, College is more important, but think about it if that were the case, why not rather find someone who wants to maintain the project... Instead he shuttered it down, this is what is off and it does look like Codeweavers gave him money to shut it down.
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Except he didn’t. It’s all still there on his GitHub if you want to take the code and fork it.

FWIW, I highly doubt any money changed hands here. I’ve hung around on several Mac/Apple gaming discords and subreddits and it’s a pretty wildly held opinion in those communities that if you care about Mac gaming you should pay for a Crossover license. Sure, Wine is free and open source, but (as I understand it) it’s Codeweavers that contribute by far the most to the Wine project. And that work costs money that they fund out of sales of Crossover and the work they do on Proton for Valve. That’s the community Marovitz is coming from. He’s even had a link in the Whisky documentation for ages saying it wouldn’t be possible without Codeweavers and recommending buying a Crossover license. So yeah, maybe he gets some referral fees, but that’s probably it.
 
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