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Wine Released - after 15 years

Ted Roche noted over on Twitter that Wine has been released. Wine as in the open source implementation of the Windows API for X, OpenGL and Unix.

This is interesting more in passing for Fox developers as Wine was one of the tools that allowed FoxPro applications to run under Linux (among other environments). It also brought the entire FoxPro EULA (and likely any other MS product) to the raging issue stage (most MS Dev EULAs state that Apps can only be distributed on the Windows platform).

In my interview with Christof, he had noted that his Guineu project allowed FoxPro code to run on Linux environments thanks to the Mono project, which is a DotNet client for those environments.  Wine is something different although if you look through the app list, you may get a poor feel for it as it would appear that the only apps people really wanted to run on those environments were games (with the exception of PhotoShop CS2, all on the Platinum, Silver and Gold lists were games).

Wine

The developer world has certainly changed from when Wine was first conceived but congrats on hitting a 1.0 release. That does make me wonder - what version is gMail? It still says "Beta" to me but what is Beta anymore? (and on that note, take it away Rick!)

Comments

Ted Roche said…
Thanks for the linkage. Do recognize, though, that "Version 1.0" means something different in a product that has been freely available for over a decade. It's a statement of stability and a notation of very specific milestones, and not the meaning it has in many commercial circles of "these were all the features we could stuff in, and get past QA, before the shipping date." WINE is the development of an Win32API-compatible set of interfaces, a target that moved pretty regularly from Win95 through 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and so forth. To achieve binary compatibility with that target is a pretty remarkable feat.
June 22, 2008 at 3:52 PM
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