Teen Coder Shuts Down Open Source Mac App Whisky, Citing Harm To Paid Apps (arstechnica.com) 35
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.
Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.
He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." 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." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."
Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.
He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." 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." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."
Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" movement (Score:2, Insightful)
... demonstrated yet again. For a given "Open Source" project, you're at the mercy of whoever's spare time and hobbyist attention. Worse yet, the end can and will come with belated notice or entirely without notice.
Note that he's pushing people toward a product that's $74/year for "support" or $450+ for a "lifetime" subscription. The cynic in me says, someone just got a freeride scholarship or a "job offer once you finish your degree as long as you kill the opensource thing that competes with us" at CodeWe
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:5, Insightful)
...so... how is that different from being at the mercy of whatever commercial entity happened to sell the product, for a commercial software product?
Except with FOSS, when push comes to shovel, you still have the source and the right to work on it. With commercial software, if the vendor decides to "go in a different direction", you're royally fucked even if you're able to muster up enough knowledge and manpower to scratch thay itch of yours yourself. Because.you're simply not even allowed to, wo begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the commercial enterprise has a defined monetary reason to continue to provide the product you are purchasing. And if they lose interest, if the product is viable there's a chance somebody else will buy it. That's a difference. Now you can rightly point out that commercial ownership alone doesn't guarantee continuity of support. And that's true. And some companies have abused that position. But you asked for a difference, and that's one.
The "well, you have the source and the right" argument always str
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" mov (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the commercial enterprise has a defined monetary reason to continue to provide the product you are purchasing. And if they lose interest, if the product is viable there's a chance somebody else will buy it. That's a difference. Now you can rightly point out that commercial ownership alone doesn't guarantee continuity of support. And that's true. And some companies have abused that position. But you asked for a difference, and that's one.
I was asking for a constructive difference, not a destructive one.
The whole spiel with "monetary reason" as incentive for a good product works so well that the term "enshittification" has been coined to describe it.
Specifically: no, the company has no direct incentive to provide you with a useful product. What they want is to make money, and make you provide them.with money.
Sometimes this means giving you a useful product, but most of the time it means giving you a carefully crafted crappy one, barely usable to keep you on your toes, locking you in, and making you not use another product.
Here's the thing though: the more control they have over your endeavor, the more shittier a product they get away with providing. And the very issue with proprietary software is the fact that it enables people to gain control over your life that have no business having any. It's a self-reinforincg invitation for scammy behavior.
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:5, Insightful)
>Well, the commercial enterprise has a defined monetary reason to continue to provide the product you are purchasing.
Do you really want a list of all commercial products that had huge userbases that were shut down?
Re: (Score:1)
+5 to a response countering an argument never made...
I didn't say those didn't exist. Only that the profit motive is there for support to continue. I even explicitly followed it with a statement that it doesn't guarantee continuity, but you didn't read that far.
Commercial has source licenses too (Score:2)
...so... how is that different from being at the mercy of whatever commercial entity happened to sell the product, for a commercial software product?
Except with FOSS, when push comes to shovel, you still have the source and the right to work on it. With commercial software, if the vendor decides to "go in a different direction", you're royally fucked even if you're able to muster up enough knowledge and manpower to scratch thay itch of yours yourself. Because.you're simply not even allowed to, wo begin with.
Nope. Commercial software may have a binary license and a source license. A licensee gets to choose which they want. The source license is pretty much like FOSS, except source code rights only extend one generation, only to those that directly have a license with the owner. Now this is easily remedied by anyone else further downstream, they can always go directly to the owner and get a license themselves.
Those who have a source license have their future in their own hands, just like FOSS.
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:3)
Oh, and:
or $450+ for a "lifetime" subscription.
...actually just translates to something like "next Tuesday" if that's what the commercial entity shipping the product feels like.
You have absolutely zero standing in requiring that someone, anyone, develops or even allows you to use the product 6 months from now, if they don't feel like continuing developmen.
"Lifetime" my ass.
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" mov (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah I went through this with The Brain. They promised me updates forever, then they renamed exactly the same product with zero new features as PersonalBrain and expected me to pay again. Fuck those fucking fucks.
Solution1 for the "Open Source Is Better" movement (Score:3)
Other than for closed products, someone can continue the development.
Re: (Score:2)
Other than for closed products, someone can continue the development.
There are commercial libraries that are closed to the public, but are available to developers as both binary and source licenses. The source licenses are effectively closed, there is no right to transfer source, however the licensee is absolutely entitled to edit, change, add to, etc and to ship new binaries, In other words the licensee is no linger dependent upon the author.
... the licensee can do so if needed.
The licensee's fate is in their own hands. Bug fixes, new features, port to new platform, etc
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:2)
That or he simply doesn't have time or motivation (or a combination of the two) to maintain it. That inevitably happens at some point unless somebody pays you. This is news to nobody.
Besides, open source work is pretty thankless, and, for most code, rarely does you any favors. I wrote an open source tool for binding key buttons to razer mice without needing their shit 700mb cloud connected, adware laden driver. I linked it to Reddit years back, and literally the first response I got was "this is pointless,
Re: (Score:2)
The internet peanut gallery is one thing, but the other is also that "Star Trek economy style" altruism feels very unrewarding without the accompanying "Star Trek economy style" post-scarcity society. It's fine and dandy to work all day on code that you're going to give away when you can just replicate a Cybertruck, but back here in the real world that truck comes with a hefty monthly payment. It ain't like you can just call up the bank and go "Well, I don't have the money this time, but check out my GitH
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you have a really niche problem you are normally really exposed to risk from your supplier because there's not necessarily enough business in solving your problem to sustain redundancy or make the niche a compelling one to stay in. If it's an OSS tool you are at risk of being left to your own devices with a last compiled version and a pile of code you may or may not be able to work with. If it's some sort of proprietary freeware or oddball license you'll be
Re: (Score:2)
Note that he's pushing people toward a product that's $74/year for "support" or $450+ for a "lifetime" subscription.
As someone that has paid for it, though not currently, I want to clarify the pricing slightly. If you buy it at $74, it does cover a year of updates and support. You will continue to have access, including re-downloading, to the last version released during that year. They also offer a discount on renewals as long as you don't lapse. The discount does adjust when the price adjusts. When it was $60, the discount was $30 off. At $74, the discount was $40 off.
Re: (Score:3)
that number 1 problem isn't a problem at all. the work is there, it may be continued by anyone else, and if people find value or interest in it odds are it will be. that is what open source is all about, power to the people.
what's wrong here are your expectations, and also your logic: you are asking from open source projects much stronger guarantees than closed source enterprises ever provided. we regularly get news here about startups closing or products getting discontinued and any users or customers bein
Re: (Score:2)
CodeWeavers may be a commercial product, but most of that money goes towards supporting WINE - they hire WINE devs to work on it.
You can basically think of CodeWeavers as the commercial arm of WINE whose goal is to provide WINE with the monetary and developer support it needs to keep the project running.
You know, sort of the whole "how to make money using FOSS - charge for support". The whole point of CodeWeavers is to offer that commercial support.
Valve may not provide monetary support, but they provide co
Re: Problem 1 for the "Open Source Is Better" move (Score:2)
I forget the name rn but there is a tool to let you use proton without wine.
Elegant way to bow out, essentially... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't fault this guy a bit. He's just an 18 year old student who needs to get out there and live life. He doesn't need to feel chained to hundreds of email complaints or feature requests for a piece of software he just did as a labor of love for a while until he got bored with it.
Redirecting people to an alternative product that's still getting regular updates (even if it's a commercial one) is a nice way to exit the scene while making those competing developers respect you. (After this guy graduates college, he might be happy he left some of those people feeling positive about him. It's a small world and it could help him get hired on someplace.)
Re: (Score:2)
Users are irrelevant.
The value in FOSS is that when I have a problem and I fix it, and share that fix, then other people can use it. It costs me nothing, and since the result is an ecosystem of free code that I can use to make solving my problems easier, it benefits me support it.
It's not a product. Users are not customers. This is not a problem, it is a feature.
Maintainers should mostly stop thrashing the code so that they can make names for themselves and expand their resumes.
Among the cult of Apple... (Score:4, Funny)
He was bribed to shut it down? (Score:1)
It's very clear this young man wants to work in this small space full of red-sea actors, and so it seems logical and reasonable to me that he would be asked to shut down his product in return for the almost-promises of a future job in it, and then actually do that... and so I'm reading this as "he was simply asked to shut his open source thing because it competed directly with a company that was willing to do an acquire-hire in order to shut him down, And either he's going to ragefully bring it back when he
Propreritary software relies on bad open software (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if Thje Gimp and Inkscape were actually good enough for Adobe to stop abusive subscriptions or Gnome was good enough for Windows to stop telemetry? I warned you for 30 years.
Telemetry is what makes Adobe's UI and usability considerably better than GIMPs. Telemetry allows Adobe to see how people use their application, what features are used the most, problems with layouts and menu choices that make workflow harder so they can be re-designed to improve them.
Re: Propreritary software relies on bad open softw (Score:2)
That's nonsense. There has never been a time when Photoshop has not had a better interface than Gimp. In fact, no version of Photoshop has not had a better interface then the GIMP of today, even after their improvements, or any other version. I know because I've used all the major versions of both from the time that Photoshop was first called Photoshop. For most of that time, Photoshop did not have telemetry.
Photoshop has a better interface than Gimp because it was not designed solely by programmers who don
Re: (Score:2)
Telemetry is what gave the world Windows8.
It's used to justify cost-cutting and dark patterns. In terms of design and usability, everything gets worse once they go full telemetry.
No Longer Very Useful Anyway (Score:2)
These Windows emulators for the Mac like Crossover, Wine, and Parallels are no longer useful for any Windows apps where performance is important. They relied on an Intel CPU to get good performance, but the days of Intel Macs are over.
Mac's (Score:1)
Re: Mac's (Score:2)
Don't expext good games on the shiny bauble of a Mac your boss buys you.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't buy a Mac for gaming.
I donâ(TM)t think many people do.
I think most Mac gamers bought their Mac for another reason(s), and at some point decided that they might like to play some games.
I do not think it is common to buy a separate computer for each discreet task you at some point decide to perform.
Hardware wise, Macs are capable of running many games, albeit at lower settings compared to machines with beefy GPUs. They are just looking for software that makes it easier to do.
Sounds quite reasonab
Re: Mac's (Score:2)
Not contributing to Wine seems the norm... (Score:1)