CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hello!

I was just thinking about Rosetta 2 and Apple's updates to it's software and I was wondering if Apple were to Sherlock the CrossOver program, would CrossOver have any protection against that in the way of patents or IP infringement? I know the code is open source and so that may complicate things but if Apple were to do this then CrossOver may become unnecessary. This is a possibility, I believe, because they already did this except for running Intel apps on M1. I understand that transferring code from Windows is much more intensive than from Intel, but it is in the future. Can anyone fill me in on this and what you guys think about the future of CrossOver if Apple were to launch a feature like this?

Thanks!

Hi there,

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this sentence - could you elaborate? "This is a possibility, I believe, because they already did this except for running Intel apps on M1."

Best,
Meredith

I think this is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software), the idea being that Apple could recreate CrossOver and ship it with the OS. The answer is that Wine is free software and there is nothing legally stopping Apple or anyone else from creating their own distribution of Wine for macOS. It's like this on purpose, we don't want any corporation to control what others can do with the Wine project. However, the CrossOver GUI and other components it relies on are proprietary, so they would still have to redo that work.

I can't speculate on Apple's intentions, but if they wanted to do this they'd have to contend with the fact that Wine is a large and complex project (and necessarily so because the Windows API is quite complex, with different systems added over many years and third-party software relying on the interactions between each of them), and learning to work on that project would be a huge investment for their developers. I think it's cheaper and easier for Apple to let us do the work of maintaining Wine for modern macOS, and this would be the case even if they wanted it as an OS feature.

While Wine and Rosetta 2 are both compatibility layers, I don't think they're really that similar. Rosetta 2 translates between different CPU instruction sets, but it does this for programs based on the same operating system API, for an OS they control. Microsoft has a similar technology for Windows on ARM. Wine translates between different operating system APIs (the code for one of which had to be recreated from scratch) but does not translate the CPU instruction set. They all have their unique challenges, but I can't think of any compatibility project that had to recreate something with a comparable scope to Wine, or even another computer system with as large an interface as the Windows API.

Thanks for the responses!

"This is a possibility, I believe, because they already did this except for running Intel apps on M1." Yeah that didn't really make sense. What I meant is that they have already implemented a code-transfer type of program, similar to CrossOver, for Intel to ARM chips, and so that means that they already have a precedent for making a similar version of CrossOver for native MacOS. (I get that Rosetta and then the Wine process are very different, but they kind of have a similar output [allowing code to run on different "platforms"] so hopefully you guys get that).

It makes a lot of sense though about how Wine is a huge open source project and so Apple probably won't try and replicate it. I still see it as a possibility in order to wall in the ecosystem a bit more, but I also don't see Apple as doing that because I feel that the percentage of Mac users who want to use Windows apps is small enough that they wouldn't do that because we already have Wine and CrossOver.

Thanks for the responses!

There is nothing to fear in this case. Rosetta 2 is the 2nd iteration of the Rosetta system. First was for the PowerPC to Intel transition, this is for the Intel to M1 transition. It will be removed in due time. Most likely within a decade.

Apple, to my knowledge, has no interest in an additional translation layer to go from Win32/Win64 -> macOS. So CrossOver and Wine are not going to be Sherlock'd.