Wine Approaches 1.0 Vintage

The Wine project is scheduled for its 1.0 release, after nearly 15 years of development. In fact, according to their "release plan" they are trying to release it close to the 15th anniversary date.

The uncertainty of the exact birthday of Wine, which is a software application which aims to allow Unix and Linux systems with Intel x86 CPUs to run Microsoft Windows programs, makes targeting a little difficult. The possibilities are:

• May 30, 1993 - Jocke Berglund suggests that being "able to run windows programs without windows" would be a "great feature"
• May 31, 1993 - Garrett D'Amore: "I think it is technically feasible to write an 'interpreter' for Windows *.EXEs that calls its own internal functions whenever a specific call to certain API addresses are made"
• Jul 8, 1993 - the first Wine ChangeLog entry

Because of that, the project is simply continuing with its biweekly release schedule and aiming for a 1.0.0 release on June 6th.

The Wine 1.0.0 release criteria may seem a bit lame, listing only four apps as it does, but as the project says:

The problem with expanding that list is that each new app adds a huge amount of testing to each release.

The four apps which must "run well" are:

• Photoshop CS2 trial
• Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 97 and 2003
• Microsoft Word Viewer 97 and 2003
• Microsoft Excel Viewer 97 and 2003

Wine will likely never run all Windows apps well, without Microsoft help, but Google recently announced it had helped the Wine project out, so who knows?