Teen coder shuts down open source Mac app Whisky, citing harm to paid apps

Summary

A tipped-cap moment The center of Whisky's homepage. The page now carries a persistent notice that "Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time." Credit: Whisky The center of Whisky's homepage. The page now carries a persistent notice that "Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time." Credit: Whisky CodeWeavers' CEO wrote on the company's blog late last week about the Whisky shutdown, topped with an image of a glass of the spirit clinking against a glass of wine. "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote James B. Ramey. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation." Ramey noted that Whisky was a free packaging of an open source project, crafted by someone who, like CrossOver, did it as "a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices." But Marovitz faced "an avalanche of user expectations," Ramey wrote, regarding game compatibility, performance, and features. "The reality is that testing, support, and development take real resources … if CodeWeavers were not viable because of CrossOver not being sustainable, it would likely dampen the future development of WINE and Proton and support for macOS gaming," Ramey wrote. "We ‘tip our cap’ to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming," Ramey wrote, strangely choosing that colloquial salute instead of the more obvious beverage analogy for the two projects. Marovitz told Ars that while user expectations were "definitely an issue," they were not the major reason for ceasing development. "I've worked on other big projects before and during Whisky's development, so I'm not a stranger to tuning out the noise of constant user expectations." Open source projects shutting down because of the tremendous pressure they put on their unpaid coders is a kind of "dog bites man" story in the coding world. It's something else entirely when a p...