RFC on our new initiative

[Jeremy Newman]

>From the desk of Jeremy White (who is at LinuxWorld ATM).

Hey folks,

We've just launched a major new initiative, the
CodeWeavers CrossOver Compatibility Center.

You can check it out at
  http://www.codeweavers.com/site/compatibility/
but I think it's fair to describe it as the appdb
on steroids.

I wanted to announce it here to give folks a sense of what we're
up to, and to apologize a bit in advance for stepping on
the toes of folks that have been doing good work within
the appdb.

However, the #1 problem we have had over the past year
or so is how to handle all the many, many requests
we get for applications not on our 'supported' list.

We've basically ended up sending people away,
which has been pretty unsatisfying.  Further, we
haven't had any good way of determining what our
priorities should be; we follow major paying clients,
but beyond that, we mostly just follow our gut
hunches in establishing priorities.  

We hope to end that; this new center lets our customers
vote for apps, and lets non customers make pledges.
We can hopefully follow those pledges to get apps
running (and we'd probably be open to having wine hackers
committing to support apps in exchange for a piece
of the pledges, but we haven't gotten there yet).

We've also, we hope, set the stage for a major new Wine
related initiative - we hope to encourage lots of ISVs
to certify their apps against Wine.  

The rationale for this is pretty simple - apps won't run
on Wine as well as they do on Windows until developers start
testing against Wine.  They've got to start somewhere - we're
trying to give them that beginning.

We're obviously also hoping that this will help us to continue
funding the work we've been able to do on Wine so far.  As much
of a struggle as it's been at times, we really feel lucky that
we've been able to do so much.  We hope that these initiatives
will give us an extra little boost so we can help push Wine
over the hump.

I sincerely believe that the day when we can honestly tell people
"It will most likely work nicely on Wine" is not long off.

I also believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, so make what
you will of that <grin>.

At any rate, this is a brand new initiative for us; call it
an 0.1.7 release.  We're very open to comments and thoughts
and suggestions, so I would greatly appreciate any public
or private comments you have to make.

Cheers,

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Newman <jnewman at codeweavers.com>
CodeWeavers, Inc.