Wine or Wine Is Not an Emulator is a native Unix/X implementation of Microsoft Windows APIs. This allows applications that have been written for Windows to run under Linux using the Wine compatibility layer.
Not all Windows applications work perfectly under Wine, however the project has been under steady development for over ten years and a large number of applications run acceptably under it.
The Wine project originally used the MIT license license, so some versions are available under this license, however all releases since 2002 have been released under the more restrictive LGPL license. A fork called Rewind attempted to continue development of the MIT licensed code, but work on the project ceased sometime around 2005.
Other projects that work closely with Wine are ReactOS – a Windows NT compatible OS and Darwine – a project to port Wine to OSX/Darwin.
Picasa, a proprietary photo organizer for Windows and Linux from Google embeds Wine, Google has contributed a large number of patches to the Wine project to make this possible.
Another commercial user of Wine is Codeweavers, who use Wine in their proprietary product Crossover Office that allows Office to run on Linux.
open-source: del.icio.us tag/open-source
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Wine
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