Alexandre Julliard has led the project since 1994. The project originated in discussions on Usenet in comp.os.linux in June 1993. Wine originally targeted 16-bit applications for Windows 3.x, but as of 2010 focuses on 32-bit and 64-bit versions which have become the standard on newer operating systems. It was inspired by two Sun Microsystems' products, the Wabi for the Solaris operating system, and the Public Windows Initiative, which was an attempt to get the Windows API fully reimplemented in the public domain as an ISO standard but rejected due to pressure from Microsoft in 1996. īob Amstadt, the initial project leader, and Eric Youngdale started the Wine project in 1993 as a way to run Windows applications on Linux.

This plurality was larger than all x86 virtualization programs combined, as well as larger than the 27.9% who reported not running Windows applications. In a 2007 survey by of 38,500 Linux desktop users, 31.5% of respondents reported using Wine to run Windows applications. Wine is primarily developed for Linux and macOS, and there are, as of July 2020, well-maintained packages available for both platforms.

While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine. 'Emulation' usually would refer to execution of compiled code intended for one processor (such as x86) by interpreting/recompiling software running on a different processor (such as PowerPC). No code emulation or virtualization occurs when running a Windows application under Wine. There is some confusion caused by an early FAQ using Windows Emulator and other invalid sources that appear after the Wine Project name being set. The selection of 'Wine is Not an Emulator' as the name of the Wine Project was the result of a naming discussion in August 1993 and credited to David Niemi. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues. Wine provides its compatibility layer for Windows runtime system (also called runtime environment) which translates Windows API calls into POSIX API calls, recreating the directory structure of Windows, and providing alternative implementations of Windows system libraries, system services through wineserver and various other components (such as Internet Explorer, the Windows Registry Editor, and msiexec ). Wine also provides a software library, named Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems. Wine (formely a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just 'Wine') is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. ReactOS (for Windows app and driver compatibility).

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