Cedega

» see cedega.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Gaming in Turkey between 2002 and 2005 happened in internet cafes, and every machine in those rooms ran Windows, because Counter-Strike ran on Windows. Paying five dollars a month to a company in Toronto so that Windows games would run on a Linux desktop solved a problem nobody in that room had. There was a second wall behind the first one: a monthly charge in dollars meant a card that could be billed abroad, and in 2004 that was not a thing every student had.

TransGaming Technologies was founded in 2001 in Toronto by Gavriel State, who had run the Linux product division at Corel. The product was WineX, a fork of Wine taken while Wine was still under the same permissive license as the X Window System, which meant the fork could be closed and sold with no obligation to send anything back. The subscription opened in october 2001 with six supported games, one of them a Linux build of The Sims. The list grew past two hundred titles over the next few years.

Five dollars a month, three month minimum. What you actually bought was a queue position: subscribers voted on which game the company should make work next, so the money was less a license fee than a vote. TransGaming also licensed the copy protection schemes of the era, SecuROM and SafeDisc, and said the contracts meant that code could never be published.

The rename came with version 4.0 on 22 june 2004. Cedega is a grape used in port wine, which was a joke about porting, and version 5.2 added a games disc database so the installer would recognize a retail CD instead of asking the user to fight it. A GUI called Point2Play sat on top for people who did not want a config file.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the license fight ~

In february 2002 the Wine project relicensed itself to the LGPL, and the stated reason was proprietary forks that took the work and returned nothing. That was about this product. TransGaming stopped pulling from Wine after the switch, kept its own tree, and promised that if the subscriber count ever reached twenty thousand it would open the source. The count never got there, so the promise cost nothing to make.

The community verdict was split for years and then stopped being split, because free Wine got good. Every year Wine closed part of the gap without a subscription attached, and the argument for paying got thinner. By the end you were paying a monthly fee for a fork that had been cut off from upstream by choice.

~ what really happened ~

The last stable release was 7.3, on 2 june 2009. After that the updates stopped arriving while the billing did not, which is a specific kind of insult to a paying user. On 28 february 2011 the Cedega Gaming Service was retired, and subscribers were pointed at something called the GameTree Linux Developer Program, which was a developer program and not a thing you could buy and run.

~ what the company became ~

TransGaming had a better asset than Cedega and knew it. SwiftShader, its software renderer, went to Google in 2015 for $1.25 million and now sits inside Chrome doing graphics for machines with no usable GPU. The graphics group went to NVIDIA the same year and became that company's first Toronto office, and the GameTree TV business was sold off in august 2016.

What was left renamed itself Findev Inc. and moved into real estate lending in the Greater Toronto Area, which it still does. The games are gone and the corporate shell writes mortgages. Cedega is one of the few dead products whose most durable piece is a rendering library that shipped to a billion browsers under someone else's name.

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