“WINE Is Not An Emulator” has been released in version 1.0. Since the first release of a 16bit version in 1993 it only took 15 years to eventually bring version 1.0 to the world. Since 1993 the development was an ongoing process with the help of a large community of volontarily testers.

In a Linux environment WINE basically hooks Microsoft’s Win32 APIs and translates them to Linux APIs – as good as possible, because Microsoft does not provide documentation for all of their APIs. Getting a program like Adobe’s Photoshop to work seemed not to be a hard issue. This is because Adobe uses an own API for many things like windows and their well known tool boxes. The main problem are programs like Microsoft’s Office. Microsoft makes heavy use of implementing undocumented APIs into their own products. Anyway this is a large milestone into a world that allows to choose which operating system fits your needs best, but without the disadvantage of having not all the standard software available.

While WINE is intended for Linux users, Crossover – a commercial version of WINE developed by Codeweavers -is available aswell for Linux as for MacOS X. Crossover allows user friendly GUI based installation of many Win32 programs and has been released at the same time in version 7.

Moreover we will see the impact of WINE 1.0 also in our beloved ReactOS project – which is a free and open source implementation of a Microsoft Windows 32 bit operating system that aims at complete binary compatibility.

Congratulations to the WINE team. Keep up your great work.