History
Bob Amstadt (the initial project leader) and Eric Youngdale started the Wine project in 1993 as a way to run Windows applications on Linux. It was inspired by two Sun Microsystems' products, the Wabi for the Solaris operating system, and the Public Windows Initiative (an attempt to get the Windows API fully reimplemented in the public domain as an ISO standard, but rejected by the entity due to pressure from Microsoft in 1996). Wine originally targeted Windows 3.x (16-bit) application software, but as of 2010 focuses on 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The project originated in discussions on Usenet in comp.os.linux in June 1993. Alexandre Julliard has led the project since 1994.
The project has proved time-consuming and difficult for the developers, mostly because of incomplete and incorrect documentation of the Windows API. While Microsoft extensively documents most Win32 functions, some areas such as file formats and protocols have no publicly-official Microsoft specification. Microsoft Windows also includes undocumented low-level functions and obscure bugs that Wine must duplicate precisely in order to allow some applications to work properly. Consequently, the Wine team has reverse-engineered many function calls and file formats in such areas as thunking. More recently some developers have suggested enhanced tactics such as examining the sources of extant free and open-source software.
The Wine project originally released Wine under the same MIT License as the X Window System, but owing to concern about proprietary versions of Wine not contributing their changes back to the core project, work as of March 2002 has used the LGPL for its licensing.
Wine officially entered beta with version 0.9 on 25 October 2005. Version 1.0 was released on 17 June 2008, after 15 years of development. Version 1.2 was released on 16 July 2010. Development versions are released roughly every two weeks.
Version 1.4 was released on 7 March 2012. The 1.4 release provides many improvements, such as the following (as quoted from the Wine HQ website): "This release represents 20 months of development effort and over 16,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new DIB graphics engine, a redesigned audio stack, and full support for bidirectional text and character shaping. It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications, notably Microsoft Office 2010."
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