TransGaming Technologies

TransGaming Technologies is a company that sells a proprietary fork of Wine for running Windows games on Linux and other operating systems. Its flagship product Cedega is available on a subscription basis at $5 US/month for a minimum of 3 months.

The company has offices in Toronto and Ottawa. It was founded by Gavriel State.

Controversy About Contributing to WINE

The company initially promised to release its Direct3D work back into Wine. However, these promises quietly disappeared from their web page a few years ago and are no longer to be seen. This was discussed on the WINE mailing-list. Supporting this assertion is that Wine is not mentioned on the page describing their products.

TransGaming has released the source code to their version of Wine--which they now call Cedega. However, it is a non-free licence (as defined by the Free Software Foundation and Debian's Free Software guidelines). The license would however permit non-commercial distribution, but when Debian maintainers got a request to package it they were threated by TransGaming with a licence change that would make distributing binaries of the code illegal. The same happened when Gentoo created build scripts for automatically building it.

Their official position is as follows:

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.

TransGaming Technologies

Controversy About Contributing to WINE

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