Teen Coder Shuts Down Free Mac App Whisky, Encourages Supporting the Paid Alternative

Whisky, a gaming-focused front end for Wine’s Windows-compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer’s toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you’ll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers’ CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky’s creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break.

“I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it’s always a balancing act between my school work and dev work,” Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars Technica. The Whisky project has “been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it,” Marovitz says, having received “a lot of questions” about the project status.

Contributing “Practically Zero”

Marovitz is no slacker, having previously worked on the Switch emulator Ryujinx, which shut down after an agreement with Nintendo, and other gaming projects, including PlayCover. So while a break is a good thing, there is another big reason: “Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole,” Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.

He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve’s work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, “the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero.” Fixes for Wine running Mac games “have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS,” Marovitz wrote, and “the pool of developers with those skills is very limited.”

While Marovitz tells Ars that he’s had “some contact with CodeWeavers” in making Whisky, “they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do.” It became clear to him, though, “from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver’s viability.”

The center of Whisky’s homepage now carries a persistent notice that “Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time.”

A Tipped-Cap Moment

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.