In 1993 a project called Wine was started as a way to run Windows applications on Linux without using an emulator. Instead Wine serves as a compatibility layer that includes their own implementation of the Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL’s) that make the Windows applications tick, and there has been a lot of reverse engineering done to get it to the current state.









It took over 12 years for the first Beta version of Wine to be released, and after a whopping 15 years Wine 1.0 will be shipping on June 6th, 2008. This has got to be one of the longest development cycles to reach version 1.0!

One of their big goals for Wine 1.0 is to get Adobe Photoshop CS2 fully functional, which is something Google is sponsoring. With over 1,200 compatible Windows applications adding Photoshop CS2 to the list will definitely be a huge success for the team and the software as a whole.

I’m definitely excited about Wine 1.0, but you can bet the bank that Microsoft isn’t jumping up and down in their seats. Sure it means that they might sell more copies of Office, but as far as I know Microsoft has never exactly gone out of their way to help out Wine.

Wine 1.0 Schedule [via Desktop Linux]