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| Industry | Software industry |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1993 |
| Products | Grasshopper |
| Website | Company website |
Mainsoft is a software company, founded in 1993, that develops interoperability software products for Microsoft Windows and Linux/Unix platforms. [1]
Mainsoft was founded in 1993, mainly to propose integration products between Windows and other systems. [2]
Mainsoft was one of the main providers for the Microsoft Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE) program, a licensing program from Microsoft that allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on Unix and Macintosh platforms. [3] Its first product, MainWin, was an implementation of the Windows API for Unix systems such as Sun Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and UnixWare, offering "most of 600 Windows calls" and reportedly allowing Windows 3.0, and later 3.1, applications recompiled for target platforms to run natively at acceptable performance without recourse to emulation. [4]
WISE software development kits (SDKs) were not directly provided by Microsoft. Instead Microsoft established partnerships to several software providers which in turn sold WISE SDKs to end-users. [5]
After the WISE program, Microsoft extended its agreements with Mainsoft to port Windows Media Player 6.3 and Internet Explorer to Unix. [6]
Since then, Mainsoft activity shifted to integration of Microsoft SharePoint into IBM products [7] [8] [9] (IBM Lotus Notes, IBM WebSphere, Rational Jazz) and products focusing on .NET Framework and JavaEE.
To be able to develop WISE SDKs, software providers needed to have access to Windows internals source code. In 2004, more than 30000 source files from Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 were leaked to the internet. It was later discovered that the source of the leak originated from Mainsoft. [10] [11]
In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.
A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is the infrastructure on which software is executed. While the individual components of a computing platform may be obfuscated under layers of abstraction, the summation of the required components comprise the computing platform.
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Windows Interface Source Environment was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on UNIX and Macintosh platforms.
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Mainsoft extended its WISE agreement with Microsoft in March 2000 to include access to the Windows 2000 source. Microsoft subsequently employed Mainsoft to port Windows Media Player 6.3 and Internet Explorer to Unix.
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