Cedega (software)

Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is the proprietary fork by TransGaming Technologies of Wine, from the last version of Wine under the X11 license before switching to GNU LGPL. It was designed specifically for running games created for Microsoft Windows under Linux. As such, its primary focus was implementing the DirectX API. WineX was renamed to Cedega on the release of version 4.0 on June 22, 2004.

Cedega Gaming Service was retired on February 28, 2011. TransGaming announced that development will continue under the GameTree Linux Developer Program.

Though Cedega is mainly proprietary software, TransGaming does make part of the source publicly available via CVS, under a mix of licenses. Though this is mainly done to allow a means for non-TG staff to view and submit fixes to the code, it is also frequently used as a means to obtain a quasi-demonstration version of Cedega. TransGaming released a proper demo of Cedega because of complaints of the difficulty of building a usable version of the program from the public CVS, as well as its outdated nature. The demo released by Cedega gave users a 14-day trial of a reasonably current version of the product with a watermark of the Cedega logo which faded from almost transparent to fully opaque every few seconds. This demo was removed without comment.

While the licenses under which the code is released do permit non-commercial redistribution of precompiled public-CVS versions of the software, TransGaming strongly discourages this, openly warning that the license of TG-copyrighted sections of code will be changed if they feel abuse is occurring or otherwise threatened. TransGaming similarly discourages source-based distributions like Gentoo Linux from creating automated tools to let people build their own version of Cedega from the public CVS.