Wine goes beta, after a mere 12 years

While some companies might announce a new beta just about every day (hey, Google, you listening?), others are far more circumspect about conferring the status on their projects. Case in point: the managers of the Wine project, which officially went beta just last night —after a mere 12 years of development. According to the developers, "this is release 0.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. After 12 years of development, this release marks the beginning of the beta testing phase. Everybody is encouraged to try it; while there are still bugs, most applications are expected to at least install and do something useful." Wine is an open-source app designed to run Windows apps under Linux (the name is actually a GNU-style acronym for "Wine is not an emulator"). Unlike other programs that allow Windows apps to be run on non-Windows platforms (such as VMWare or Virtual PC), Wine does not require a copy of Windows to function. The new release also forms the backbone of CrossOver Office 5.0, CodeWeavers' commercial Windows app-manager for Linux, which CodeWeavers' says can reliably run Office 2003, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and other popular Windows programs.

 

Tags: commercial, opensource