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posted by martyb on Monday November 07 2016, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the catching-up-on-APIs dept.

CodeWeavers reports

Gone are [...] the days that we hopelessly tried to register Microsoft Office 2013. You read that right, people. [On November 2], we successfully registered Microsoft Office 2013 in a CrossOver 16 alpha build. We [can] also:

  • Open, create, edit, save, and print Microsoft office documents
  • Activate a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 [with a] product key or a 365 subscription
  • Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project

"Everyone at CodeWeavers is incredibly excited to see Microsoft Office 2013 installing, registering, and running in CrossOver. After four years of continued development, we are preparing to deliver support for the 2013 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project in CrossOver 16 (due out later this year). And we hope that our development will continue making strides to include support for Outlook 2013 and Microsoft Office 2016 in the coming months." -- James Ramey, President


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @02:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @02:40PM (#423513)

    GREAT! WONDERFUL!

    Now will somebody tell me what CrossOver is and why the fuck I should care? Preferably without clicking into a producer's press release / own site?

    Thanks.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Kunasou on Monday November 07 2016, @02:55PM

    by Kunasou (4148) on Monday November 07 2016, @02:55PM (#423519)

    An application based on Wine for Linux...
    I tried it a few years ago (they sent a promo with 1 year free subscription) and I couldn't see a big difference, some apps didn't even work on it and they ran well on latest wine-staging.
    Maybe the situation has improved somehow.

    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday November 07 2016, @03:43PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Monday November 07 2016, @03:43PM (#423536)

      Your experience was basically mine when I tried their OSX offering within the last year. Maybe the Linux one is better, but I can't actually figure out what it gets you over Wine other than maybe a little less needing to configure stuff. Maybe.

      --
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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Monday November 07 2016, @04:40PM

      by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Monday November 07 2016, @04:40PM (#423586) Journal

      There are differences. Mainly I think they put in special hacks to get various applications working that can't go in the main WINE source tree because they're horrible hacks. Eventually, of course, they solve the problem correctly and commit it to the main WINE source tree. I've had MS Office 2010 consistently working in a free-promo CrossOver Office even though it wouldn't work correctly with WINE. MS Office 2013 wouldn't work in either last I tried.

      They do good work, and buying a subscription supports WINE. I'll probably get one once Office 2013 is officially supported because I sometimes teach a class that uses Office 2013, and not having to go to Windows for that is worth the $50 or whatever it costs for a year subscription.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:12PM (#423656)

      An application based on Wine for Linux...

      ... that you rent
      Their pricing page shows the price for using it for 3, 6 and 12 months.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:26PM (#423704)

        That's not the price for continuing to use it; that's the price for a subscription to updates. Once your subscription expires, you're free to continue using the final version your subscription let you download indefinitely. You just won't get updates.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:49AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:49AM (#423978)

          Based on my experience with regular wine, once you have a version that works, you want to stick with that one anyway.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM (#423520) Journal

    Apparently it lets you run Windows applications within Mac or Linux. I'm not sure why gewg_ would submit this when he is so interested in countries switching to FLOSS.

    I wonder if CrossOver supports phone home functions.

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    • (Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Monday November 07 2016, @03:37PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Monday November 07 2016, @03:37PM (#423534) Journal

      The post says "we successfully registered Microsoft Office 2013"; registration is a phone-home function.

      Even though Crossover is proprietary software, having the option of running MS Office on Crossover is a bit more freedom than being locked into running MS Office on Windows. Improvements in Crossover are eventually contributed to Wine [winehq.com], which is copyleft.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Monday November 07 2016, @04:12PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Monday November 07 2016, @04:12PM (#423563) Journal

      In some cases, switching both the operating system and applications at once causes more of a retraining and support headache for IT than switching one at a time.

      And some companies must* continue to use a few proprietary applications even after a company-wide switch to GNU/Linux because others with whom they trade require use of specific proprietary software. For example, Amazon offers a tool for sellers using its marketplace platform to pre-validate "Listing Loader" feeds of product offers before uploading them to Marketplace Web Service (MWS). But this tool is implemented as macros in an Excel workbook. Skipping pre-validation is possible, as LibreOffice Calc is still compatible enough with Excel workbooks in "macros off" mode to read out the required column headings as well as the other sheets that contain high-level textual descriptions of field values. But then each submitted feed counts against the seller's daily upload quota on MWS even if it has obvious errors that the server-side validator catches and the client-side pre-validator would have caught.

      * Technically, either this or stop trading.

      • (Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday November 07 2016, @05:51PM

        by zafiro17 (234) on Monday November 07 2016, @05:51PM (#423637) Homepage

        I tested it back in like 2004, when they gave away a free sample or demo period or something. At the time I vastly preferred StarOffice 6 and 7 (predecessor to Openoffice and now LibreOffice) so didn't wind up keeping Crossover. But at that time, having a fully functioning Word 2000 app running on my Linux desktop (was probably Xandros back at the time) was really out of this world. Just didn't need to keep it running, so I stuck with StarOffice.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:02PM (#423821)

      Pino P got it.
      In my Original Submission, [soylentnews.org] I said

      "I'm wondering what the reaction will be from mcgrew".

      mcgrew has said previously that publishers require an actual M$Orifice installation to interact with them and that the slight differences of LibreOffice, et al., are not acceptable.

      He has also mentioned his aggravation with Windoze and his desire to use Linux fulltime.
      Celestial (4891) recently expressed a similar disappointment/desire. [soylentnews.org]
      ...plus a mention of Windoze-only apps.
      Days ago, RoboLinux was my best suggestion for these folks. (Same page) [soylentnews.org]

      So, this was specifically for that bunch.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 2) by Nesh on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM

    by Nesh (269) on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM (#423523)
    What: CrossOver is a proprietary version of Wine for running Windows applications on macOS and Linux made by CodeWeavers.
    Why care: no idea. I'd run windows if I wanted to run Windows applications;
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @04:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @04:13PM (#423566)

      Why I care is that at my employment, all Windows machines will be required to move to Windows 10 in the coming year. I will use the transition time to convert to a linux machine (right now I run linux as a guest VM in a Windows 7 host) and having something that is supposed to make Office "just work" on linux is very appealing to me. I was planning on installing Windows 10 on a virtual machine, but I might not even do that if I can get by with this solution.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @05:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @05:11PM (#423609)

      One reason why is that CrossOver is fairly good at two things: enterprise and upstream.

      Many of the businesses I've seen do the Windows-to-Linux (and lesser for the Windows-to-Mac) transition use, or at least evaluate CrossOver, to assist with the transition. The fact they got the latest Office to work may be a signal of what is to come in the enterprise market for Linux adoption.

      Another is that CrossOver are pretty good when it comes to upstreaming improvements they make in WINE. One reason for that is that it is much easier to maintain your own fork when it hasn't diverged much from the upstream version. It also helps because the free labor to fix the improvements means that they don't have to pay for it directly. It also provides a legal buffer when it comes to reverse engineering, as it is easier to claim a clean implementation when the parties who did it have bigger walls of separation between them.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @04:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @04:24PM (#423575)

    do your own google search.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:50PM (#423681)

      do your own google search.

      With respect, No.

      The point of this place is to aggregate news. I shouldn't have to search for jack shit. Vetted stories should clearly explain the 5W&H of a story, or the submitter should take the time to write a couple sentences explaining the missing ones. I shouldn't even have to RTFA if the submitter's done a proper job.

      This.... was worse than a Slashvertisement.

      Thanks to everyone who answered the question seriously, and it is appreciated. Two additional sentences in the summary would've done it for me.

      • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday November 07 2016, @09:24PM

        by isostatic (365) on Monday November 07 2016, @09:24PM (#423758) Journal

        Crossover is hardly the latest faddy javascript language, it's been arround for well over a decade. I'd hope that people on a site like this would recognise terms like "Codeweavers" and "Crossover".

  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday November 07 2016, @05:11PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Monday November 07 2016, @05:11PM (#423610) Homepage Journal

    CrossOver is a Microsoft Windows compatibility layer available for macOS and Linux. [wikipedia.org]. I had no idea, either. Not sure how it compares with Wine. Looks like the license is proprietary and/or GPL. I remember in the days before Wikipedia everyone always seemed to think it was normal to talk about stuff without defining it. Wikipedia's done an amazing job of spelling out what stuff is for people who don't know, clueless people like me, for over ten years now.

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