Cedega

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Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is TransGaming Technologies' proprietary fork of Wine, which is designed specifically for running games written for Microsoft Windows under Linux. As such, its primary focus is implementing the DirectX API.

The community has managed to keep Wine in touch with developments in Cedega; many of the games and 3D applications perform almost as well as when natively running under Microsoft Windows.

WineX was renamed to Cedega on the release of version 4.0 on June 22, 2004.

1 Licenses
2 Controversy
3 See also
4 External links

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Licenses

Though Cedega is mainly proprietary software, Transgaming does make part of the source public available via CVS, under a mix of licenses. Though this is mainly done to allow a means for non-TG staff to view and submit fixes to the code, it is also frequently used as a means to obtain a sort-of 'demo' version of Cedega. No doubt due to complaints of the difficulty of building a usable version of the program from the public CVS, Transgaming has finally released a proper demo of Cedega, which has eliminated the need (and frustration) of using the public CVS to get a trial version.

Note that while the licenses the code is released under do permit non-commercial redistribution of precompiled public-CVS versions of the software, Transgaming strongly discourages this, openly warning that the license of TG-copyrighted sections of code will be changed if they feel abuse is occuring or otherwise threatened. Transgaming similarly discourages source-based distributions like Gentoo Linux from creating automated tools to let people build their own version of Cedega from the public CVS.

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Controversy

While Cedega is popular among many Linux users, there is a sizeable portion of the community that refuses to use the program. There are three main reasons for this.

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"Free riding" on the free software community

Many in the community object to Transgaming's business practices by "making a quick buck" off the back of the Wine project, without contributing back. Transgaming obtained the source to the original Wine project when it was under a BSD-style license (non copyleft) and this license placed no requirements on how TransGaming published their software. TransGaming, unlike other companies with similar models, decided to release their software as proprietary software. Transgaming does release portions of the source code via CVS, however it attaches legal restrictions which mean that it is not free software. Cedega includes licensed support for several types of CD-based copy protection (notably SecuROM and SafeDisc), the code for which TransGaming say they are under contract not to disclose.

In reaction, the Wine project changed its license to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This means that anyone who publishes a modified version of Wine, must publish the source code under an LGPL-compatible (and therefore free software) license. TransGaming stopped using code contributed to Wine when the license was changed.

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Reaction to inclusion in Distros

When some Linux distributions, notably Debian GNU/Linux and Gentoo, decided to package TransGaming's software, TransGaming threatened to make the license even more restrictive to prohibit this.

Quote from the Cedega license:

"Note that while this license does permit certain kinds of non-commercial distribution of pre-compiled binary packages of Cedega, doing so on a large scale is discouraged, as it affects TransGaming's ability to continue to improve and develop the code. TransGaming reserves the right to change the license under which TransGaming-owned copyright code is made available, and will not hesitate to do so if non-commercial distribution of pre-compiled binary packages adversely affects the financing of continued development."

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General criticism of the existence of emulators

Many Linux users feel that in encouraging development of Cedega, they are discouraging the development of native ports of games or even Linux-exclusive titles such as those made by Loki Software.

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