Wine Evolution

This article describes the emergence of the free Wine project, its development and the emergence of various commercial branches. Since its inception, Wine has made it possible to switch to Linux for many Windows users around the world. By ensuring the operation of Windows applications on UNIX-like operating systems, the project has attracted a lot of public attention. Someone took this idea of ​​cross-platform enthusiasm and even contributed to the project. Someone is still skeptical.
Anyway, the phrase “Wine is not an emulator” is familiar to most of the Linux community today.
The article attempts to trace the development of the Wine project and evaluate possible prospects.


Prerequisites

First you need to describe the situation that has developed in the software market by 1993, the moment of the origin of the project Wine. In 1990, Microsoft released Windows 3.0, the first popular version of Windows. In 1992, the expansion of Windows 3.1 followed. Microsoft products were becoming more widespread. At the same time, the free software development community was actively developing.
The fact that the ability to work with Windows-based applications is important for an operating system that claims to be popular, many developers realized. Even at IBM, which sought to compete with Windows and OS / 2, they recognized the need to work with Windows programs and added this functionality to the new version of their operating system.
However, the first serious step towards cross-platform was made by the Sun developers. Their commercial product Wabi, introduced in 1993, allowed running Windows applications on the Solaris x86 and Solaris 2.2 operating systems. Until now, products to run Windows programs required hardware emulation, as well as Windows and DOS installations. The uniqueness of Wabi was that it allowed to broadcast calls to Windows windows directly to calls to X Windows.
This development has aroused great interest among STRs. Is it possible to apply the same approach for the newly created Linux operating system?
')
How did wine begin

Since it was impossible to adapt Wabi for use in Linux, discussions began about creating such an alternative implementation of the Win16 API functions. To discuss the development of such an environment, a special mailing list was created. Soon, among the panellists, the name Wine began to be used.
A few words about the title. Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for “Wine is not emulator” - “Wine is not an emulator”. In a similar way, the name of the GNU operating system, GNU is not Unix, is formed.
Meanwhile, the Wine development team was forming, headed by Bob Amstadt. Also at the time, Miguel de Icaza, who later became the founder of GNOME, and Alexander Juilliard, from 1994 to this day, the leader of the Wine project, participated in the development.
At first, work progressed rather quickly, in the first six months it was possible to launch Klondike. In November 1993, it was also possible to transfer Wine to another architecture - NetBSD. But despite the initial successes, the release release was delayed.

Project development

The year 1994 brought many changes both in Wine itself and in the organizational side of the project, the place of the leader was taken by Alexander Julliard.
Window procedures were rewritten into direct calls to the Xlib library. It took the creation of mechanisms to support network connections, registry files and locks. But perhaps the most significant changes caused the release of 32-bit versions of Windows. Win32 support was implemented in Wine in May 1995.
Advances occurred in areas other than programming. Wine documentation was developed, and in 1997 the winehq.org website was created.
The next important stage in the development of Wine came when Corel decided on the need for full-fledged support of Linux for their products. There began the development of its own Linux distribution, but the support of a wide range of Corel applications required substantial revision of Wine. For the first time in the history of the project, its development was funded by a commercial organization.
But at the end of 2000, rumors appeared that Corel was going to stop supporting Linux. In early 2001, the dissolution of the Corel Linux-department was officially announced.
But, fortunately, the Wine project did not stop, left without support from Corel. A significant part of the work took the company Codeweavers, previously participated in the finalization of Wine for Corel.
After discussions in the open-source software community in 2002, it was decided to change the license of Wine from MIT to LGPL. This largely contributed to the development of the project, allowed to receive significantly more patches for Wine and include new applications in support.
Until 2005, Wine existed as an alpha version. The first beta version of Wine 0.9.0 was released on October 25, 2005. Since then, updates have been launched every 2 weeks. And in the middle of 2008, after 15 years of development, Wine 1.0 was released, the first to be recognized as stable.

Commercial versions of Wine

A significant contribution to the development of the free Wine project was made by companies that created commercial products based on its source codes.

• CrossOver is a product of Codeweavers aimed at launching the most popular office and other Windows applications: Microsoft Office of different versions, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Lotus Notes, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes and others. To support these applications, CodeWeavers developers add their own patches, as well as graphical configuration utilities.

• Cedega is a commercial version of Wine that allows you to run Windows games on Unix systems. It adds improved support for API DirectX, as well as some copy protection used in games.

• WINE @ Etersoft is a product developed by St. Petersburg company Etersoft. It is focused on launching such popular Russian business applications as 1C: Enterprise, Consultant, Garant, KOMPAS-3D, etc. Unlike regular Wine, it supports protection keys, device drivers and multi-user operation.

Conclusion

Significance of such a development as Wine is unlikely that anyone would dispute today. The transition from MS Windows to the GNU / Linux operating systems still assumes the inheritance of Windows applications. Therefore, since its inception, Wine has attracted considerable interest in the open-source software community as well as in business circles.
However, during the lifetime of the free project, development has progressed with varying success. In the history of Wine, there have been both very productive and successful periods, as well as serious crises. The combination of open development by a group of enthusiasts and support from commercial organizations allowed the free project to evolve. In many ways, this was facilitated by the creation of commercial products based on Wine.
Of course, there is a field for further development of the Wine project. Many popular Windows-programs still do not have support, or their support requires significant modifications of Wine. As at the beginning of its existence, the project is open to those who want to contribute.