OSNews: Interview with Lindows.com’s Carmony, LindowOS for Free

“1. Some people believe that Lindows.com promised
Microsoft Windows application compatibility two years ago and that
later you opted-out from this promise. What is the whole story and
truth about this?

“Kevin Carmony: When we started
Lindows.com, we thought it might help people who were migrating to
desktop Linux if they could still run their legacy Microsoft
Windows software. So, we invested over a half million dollars into
WINE, a technology used to run Microsoft Windows software under
Linux. Most of that investment went to to pay Codeweavers to get
Microsoft Office 2000 to run under Linux. After a few months of
working on this project, Codeweavers did get Microsoft Office to
run, but two other interesting things happened simultaneously as
well. The first was that we decided it made more sense to put
development into helping create better native Linux applications,
and second, Codeweavers became re-energized and excited about WINE.
Because all of our WINE code was open sourced, we wished Jeremy and
company good luck, walked away from our investment, and
discontinued any further work with WINE. Codeweavers then continued
on with this code as the starting place for what later became
Crossover Office…”

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