Wine 1.0 Released After 15 Years of Development

In what may be one of the longest development and testing processes in the history of programming (15 years, actually), Wine 1.0 is now available for free download at the project's Web site. Commonly used to play Windows-only games on computers with a Linux operating system, thousands of other applications and tools also work under Wine, including such notables as Photoshop CS2 and WinRAR.

While the Wine team acknowledges that "compatibility is not perfect yet," the release of 1.0 is still a remarkable milestone.

Many people choose to also (or instead) run a customized, commercial version of Wine: CrossOver Linux from CodeWeavers. It comes with technical support and some additional features and testing that the original version of Wine does not. If a recent blog posting by the CrossOver development team is any indication, we may see an update from the folks at CodeWeavers sometime soon.

Jeremy White, the founder and CEO of Codeweavers, says, "We remain committed to providing our customers with a stable, and reliable product; one that has been tested thoroughly. So even though we are the major driving force behind Wine, CrossOver always lags behind Wine so that we can do careful development and testing."