Wine (software)

WINE is the name of a project that allows computers running a Unix operating system to run programs designed for Microsoft Windows. The name was derived from a typically self-referential Unix acronym: Wine Is Not an Emulator. The irony of this is that while it is technically correct, it does much the same thing as an emulator and is probably viewed as such by most of its users. Wine is a free project. The licensing, while not published under the GNU public license, is similar to another free project X11.

The Wine project began in 1993 and is still in development. The project probably orginated out of discussions on comp.os.linux, and the first working code was created by Eric Youngdale and Bob Amstadt. The reason Wine is not an emulator is that emulators tend to duplicate the whole environment a program runs in, whereas wine provides library code that windows programs call.

As of now Wine does run many well known programs, such as older versions of Microsoft Office, but with varying levels of success. The involvement of Corel in the project, chiefly employing for a time one of Wine's main coders Alexandre Julliard as well as providing other programmers, helped the project. This help was motivated by Corels porting of its own suite of office programs to linux, however due to financial difficulties the effort has now stopped and Corel has withdrawn their support.

The project has taken so long at least partially because of problems with Microsoft's documentation of their API. The Wine team have had to reverse engineer many of the function calls that some of Microsoft's programs use, as these do not appear in any documentation.

External link: http://www.winehq.org