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Saturday, April 2, 2016

Sourceforge Community Choice Project of the Month Wine

For our April “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Wine, an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Marcus Meissner, longtime developer of Wine, shared his thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.

SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the Wine project please.
Marcus Meissner (MM): The Wine project was launched with the goal to run Windows applications on the Linux operating system and also to provide a porting environment for Windows applications to Linux.

As it was launched around 1993 these were mostly Windows 3.1 applications.

SF: What made you start this?
MM: We started this project because a commercial vendor (WABI) alternative has shown it feasible to do and we wanted to provide an opensource implementation.

SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
MM: Yes, its original vision has been achieved after 15 years of development we had declared a Wine 1.0 release in 2008.
It took very long as Windows itself is a moving target.
Various commercial products embed Wine or are actually Wine in a commercial offering. Nearly every Linux user [has] heard of Wine.

Full interview
 

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