rleyton writes "Codeweavers have just announced Crossover Office, a Wine derivitive which allows MS-Office 97 & 2000 products as well as Lotus Notes to run without a Windows OS License. If it's as cool as the Crossover plugin product, then it could mean a significant step forward in Wine's progress." NewsForge got hold of a final beta copy a couple of days ago and has a Crossover Office review up already, and DesktopLinux.com has one too. This looks pretty cool, yes. Now if a PHB tells you can't run Linux, because you need Office - tell him you'll save money by not needing a Windows license, and call still use Office.

krugdm writes "Gamespot is reporting that The Sims has now sold 6.3 million copies and has overtaken Myst as the best-selling PC game ever." My Sims lie dormant awaiting a wine that can breath life into them once again. I just have been too busy to reboot.

uhmmmm writes "The Wine developer's votes are in. Wine will change license, as was suggested would happen, but it's not yet decided to what exactly. Alexandre notes 'We now have to decide the implementation details, like the exact license used, whether to require copyright assignments, etc.'"

evil_one writes: "The end is finally here for Corel, who released a Debian based linux distro a couple years ago (now owned by Xandros) Has announced that they are shutting down their Open Source Development web site as of March 1st. As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect. It's sad to see this, especially with the amount of work that Corel has put into Wine and their other projects, which include add-ons to KDE." Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)

willybur submits word of this Debian Planet story on the upcoming release of its next stable version. The article says: "According to Anthony Towns (our beloved Release Manager), woody is nearing release. All but three RC base bugs are fixed now, and the bugsquashing party is working through the RC bugs in standard. It's not all good news though. The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft, crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively, kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly ripped out of testing ... Check the stuff that's important to you and get it fixed before it's too late." Says willybur: "See the announcement on debian-devel-announce."

isolation wrote to us about the proposal to change the Wine license to LGPL. Jeremey's got his ideas and reasons in the e-mail there, and it makes sense - Jeremy's a smart guy. There's a call for opinions on this as well, so read through it, and offer commentary.

Pazuzues writes "I found something that you could say peaked my interest. It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now. DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around. Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource. I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

matroid writes "Wired reports that the upcoming WINE version 1.0 may be just what Linux needs to get users to migrate from Windows to Linux."

Dr. Spork writes "If you want to read a discussion about OSS licenses that is not a flame war, check out this week's Wine Weekly News. Among the highlights are Gavriel State's arguments for keeping WINE on a BSD-style license. His company has been criticized for not releasing some very cool D3D code. He claims one reason is because 'there are companies out there who will benefit significantly from commercial use of this code, and who can afford to sponsor a portion of the development cost. Until such a sponsorship happens, we cannot apply the WineHQ license to that code.' GNU purists might think it's in bad taste to use the code as a hostage, but in a world where many rich companies rely on OSS, perhaps this signals the emergence of a new business model. You might call it 'code brokering,' and interestingly, you can't do it with the GPL."

A reader writes "In this editorial at DesktopLinux.com, commentator Malcolm Dean questions whether Lindows is any sort of linux at all, and suggests that the world might actually be better off without yet another proprietary/commercial Windows wannabe (that runs Windows apps, no less). Dean asks how it is possible that, as Lindows.com founder Michael Robertson manages to claims in his latest newsletter, Lindows' ten million lines of code include a Windows Compatibility Module that somehow works better than anything else available today. "Has Mr. Robertson's team accomplished in a few months what took WINE years?" Where is the substance to back the hype? Besides, what if Lindows does succeed: do we really want to perpetuate the use of Windows software on a linux platform?"

ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?

As you know, we sent questions out to Bruce Campbell a few weeks ago, and his answer are below. Please note that Bruce didn't have time to reply to all of them via email as he was pretty busy, so he called and dictated answers. I've done the best I can to convey his answers below. Thanks to Bruce for the interview! Also, if you haven't picked up his book yet, you should. It is in it's 8th printing, so it's been doing well.

friedmud wrote in to tell us about a comment from a Maxis developer, Don Hopkins, who did a partial linux port of "The Sims". You can find his post here (3rd one down, comment from Don Hopkins titled "Reality check from a game developer") in a LinuxGames.com forum. I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Wine is the best way to have games happen on Linux but his comments on the economics of Linux games development and especially the costs of keeping versions concurrent on multiple platforms are insightful.

Eugenia writes "OSNews talks with Alexandre Julliard, the WINE project leader and also CodeWeaver's coder, regarding the future of WINE, the obstacles of the development, the WINE commercialization and lots more. An interesting read overall."

pseen wrote to us with a conversation with Scott Draeker (of Loki Games concerning the recent Transgaming and Wine announcements, as well as the Mandrake Linux Gamer announcements.

dcd asks: "It is interesting from time to time to look at what others are searching for using Google Zeitgeist The number 2 gaining request was for Moorhuhn3, which seems to be a freeware game that is popular in Germany. Searching for 'moorhuhn linux' brings up this page which when translated on google are directions and links to play it on Linux using WINE. Now two questions come to mind: Has anyone found a 'real-time' method to find out what is actively being searched for on google (I think alta-vista used to do this); Has anyone tried this freeware game, and was it interesting? For the curious, here's another web page describing this game and Linux." Back in a time before Google, I used Metacrawler for searches and that had Metaspy which I think is a good example of what the submittor is describing. I haven't tried this Moorhuhn Chicken game, but after visiting the sites, I must say it looks intriguing.

nstbbuff sent in a link to a story running at ZD about Lindows, a recently funded startup founded by MP3.com's old CEO that plans to sell a WINE oriented Linux dist for $99. As usual I'm skeptical about these sorts of things, but provided code is released back, I'm down with it. Meanwhile Transgaming is doing their thing, but with game-specific stuff. Their flagship release is The Sims, but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows. I'm still skeptical -- I mean, how many closed WINE forks does the world need?

Tonight in Slashback: More on TransGaming's approach to the world (and licenses), another sweet box of French Linux goodness, another piece of the stolen-Enigma puzzle is pressed firmly into place, and a small piece of travel advice.

nicsterrr asks: "Since returning to education and discovering the delights of signal processing and numerical computation, I have become increasingly unhappy with Matlab. Mathworks refuse to release the Linux student version of Matlab in Europe (their official reason is that apparently us Europeans would pirate it frantically if they did), and hence I have had to run the windows version with Wine (with moderate success). I (and many others) would love to use Octave as our primary numerical computation package, but it is limited in areas such as signal processing, control systems, and especially graphical functions. Their homepage does not give much insight into Octave's current development and likely future. How many people are involved in Octave, or would like to be? Am I one of many that feel a new, concerted effort should be taken to transform Octave into a complete replacement for Matlab? This is a critical piece of open source software for universities and the lack of a Matlab replacement is one of the reasons my department frowns on our requests for Linux based PCs."

twilightzero asks: "Recently a friend of mine who is chief engineer at a medium size recording studio/radio station has become increasingly unhappy with Windows (and would like to stay away from Macs) and has asked me if there is any sort of professional audio solution for Linux. Has anybody, anywhere ever tried this? Is it possible to buy a pro audio card with Linux drivers and just run Sound Forge in WINE or do you need an entirely native package?" This is one of those questions that just needs to be answered. What Open Source sound packages out there are good enough for even the professionals to use when they need to make their squeaks, squeals, and whistles. Also, what can they use to put their created sounds together into some semblance of music?