Wine's roots can be traced back to 1993. At the time several forces were
converging that made running Windows applications appealing. Microsoft had
successfully steered its Windows program to the forefront of personal
computers. IBM had hopes that OS/2 would catch on, but even they admitted
that support of Windows programs was necessary and built the ability into
their product. The free software movement spawned in the eighties was
rapidly gaining ground as people discovered it was possible to run a
multiuser, multitasking operating system on a PC.
Sun's acquisition of Praxsys Technologies in September of 1992 led to the
development of a product called Wabi. Sun first demonstrated the
software at the 1993 Solaris Developers Conference. It allowed users of
Solaris x86 and Solaris 2.2 for SPARC to run Windows applications out of the
box. Other products at the time allowed Windows programs to be run, but they
required machine-level emulation and the installation of DOS and Windows.
Wabi was unique in that it allowed Windows windowing calls to be translated
directly to X Windows calls. By emulating the rest of the x86 code it was
possible to actually run Windows programs faster on a RISC workstation!
Wabi's more advanced features included Bitstream's font handling technology
to handle TrueType fonts.
Users of the upstart Linux operating system began discussing the possibility
of a similar approach in June of 1993. At the time, the chances of Wabi
being ported to Linux were slim to none. A mailing list was set up to
facilitate discussion. The name "Wine" was quickly adopted. Several of
the early developers included some of the first Linux kernel hackers including
Eric Youngdale and David Metcalfe. Other recognizable names included
Alexandre Julliard who now leads Wine and Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame.
Bob Amstadt headed the development.
Initial work consisted of getting a program loader working that could run
Windows' 16-bit binaries. That work was primarily headed by Bob.
Alexandre's involvement centered around merging windowing functions written
by Peter MacDonald in Tcl/Tk. Progress moved along quickly, and within
the first 6 months it was possible to run Solitaire. November of 1993 also
saw the first port of Wine to another architecture - John Brezak submitted
patches to allow Wine to run on NetBSD. Bob estimated that with the current
rate of development the team was six months to a year away from release.
Ironically, Wine continued to be six months to a year from release for the
next decade.
Early communication between developers took many forms, including the
linux-kernel mailing list. The very first Wine mailing list was operated
by Robert to allow discussions between developers. After a year with many
successes and growing interest in the project they asked for the creation
of the newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine. The vote was
overwhelmingly in favor of its creation and it became part of the Usenet
hierarchy on July 19th, 1994. The current mailing lists where most
development is discussed were created by Doug Ridgway in October, 1998.
The early years saw many changes to Wine's development. Robert stepped
down in 1994 and Alexandre took over development. Windowing was rewritten
as straight Xlib calls. Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft began releasing
32-bit code and adding new functionality to their operating systems. It
was no longer enough to just load code and run it, a tighter integration
was needed with the underlying operating systems (primarily Linux.) Mechanisms
needed to be added that supported network connections and registry files.
Wine's architecture had relied on a shared address space between applications.
Gradually it became clear that address space separation was needed to
increase security and support shared libraries trying to access the same
space. Work commenced in early 2000 and continues to this day.
Alexandre recalled some of the early milestones for Wine in a keynote
he gave at the first Wineconf:
May 1995: beginnings of Win32 support
July 1995: switch to autoconf
January 1996: Word and Excel reported to run
November 1997: Creation of winehq.com web site
Volunteers began contributing to aspects other than programming. John
Sheets and Susan Farley worked on some of the original documentation.
Doug Ridgway set up the WineHQ web
site in 1997. The site was taken over by Corel for a few years, and
then CodeWeavers took it over from them in March, 2002. Jeremy Newman
now serves as the webmaster.
The Wine Weekly News first
appeared on the web site in 1999. Originally authored by Eric Pouech,
Brian Vincent took over in 2001. Over the past few years several
features have been added to the web site. A redesign in early 2003
added several pages to help new users get acquainted with Wine, project
lists for developers to think about, and a large list of frequently
asked questions.
In 1998 a strategic decision was made by Corel to wholeheartedly support
Linux. The key elements were centered around providing a Linux-based system
that was both simple to install and easy to use. To this end, they sought to
provide both a Linux based distribution and support for their applications.
Corel's suite of office programs demanded a high level of Wine sophistication.
For the first time in Wine history commercial development was funding its
development. Internally, Corel had two different teams working on Linux.
One group concentrated on server development, the other on application
support. Corel maintained a great relationship with Wine, partly due to
the involvement of another company doing a lot of the work - CodeWeavers.
The bubble soon burst. Rumors began circulating at the end of 2000
that Corel would discontinue its support for Linux. By early 2001 Corel
officially announced it would spin off its Linux division, specifically
the group working on the distribution. Their support for work on Wine
ended. The intellectual property and some of the developers eventually
formed a new Linux company - Xandros.
It wasn't long before others joined in to fill the void. By this time
Alexandre had already taken a position with
CodeWeavers doing much of the
low level work on Wine. CodeWeavers had gotten involved with Wine in
1999 and were contracted by Corel to improve parts of Wine that would
benefit Corel's applications. CodeWeavers began developing their own products
and putting a lot of polish on Wine. Their own version of Wine included
graphical management tools and an easy setup. Several distributions
made it available for download. Their first product,
CrossOver Plugin,
allowed Linux users to run Netscape plugins designed for Windows.
Newer versions of the product have added support for even more plugins.
They released CrossOver Office in March, 2002 to provide support for
office applications like Excel and Lotus Notes.
TransGaming
formed in August of 2001. Gavriel State, who had been with
Corel, left and formed his own company. Newer PC games had been
focusing on Microsoft's DirectX interfaces for everything from input
devices to 3D acceleration.
By tying it to their operating systems it made porting games to different
platforms very difficult. DirectX support in Wine was first added by
Marcus Meissner in 1997 and was very limited. Gav
sought to commercialize the development of it and create a new version
of Wine designed for gamers. More technologies than just DirectX were
needed and some of the early work focused on including support
for copy protection measures. WineX 1.0 was released in October of 2001
with support for six games.
Also in 2001 another company announced intentions to work with Wine.
Lindows.com
wanted to create a Linux distribution that was simple to use
and let users run Windows programs. It wasn't long before they abandoned
the idea in favor of native Linux applications. Before that happened
they sponsored Wineconf - a three day event in March, 2002 that brought
together developers from around the world. To make matters more interesting,
on the eve of the conference the Wine community had concluded another
licensing flamewar discussion.
Wine's storied history of licensing has sparked many debates. The issue of
licensing surrounds itself with two primary areas - the license of the Wine
code itself and the license of applications produced using Winelib. The
Wine developers' goal is to give people the ability to both implement and
add to the Wine project in such a way it doesn't hinder others from doing
the same. At the same time they want to give other developers the chance
to port their application without the fear of being bound to a software
license that prevents them from doing what they want with their creation.
In the beginning, Wine adopted a BSD-style license. At
the end of 1999 discussion began about changing the license. Richard
Stallman had pointed out that it was incompatible with the GPL which
potentially causes problems with any open source project wishing to use
Wine code. Most developers didn't see a need to craft a new license and
the X11 license, a derivative
of the BSD license, had the most support. A vote was called for and in
January of 2000 Alexandre announced that it would become the new license
of Wine.
In March of 2002 a poll was conducted among both the free and commercial
developers of Wine to see if there was interest in moving to a different
license. Most developers did not want their code to be appropriated by a
commercial entity and there were concerns that might happen. After much
debate they chose the Lesser General Public
License and on March 9th, 2002 the Wine source code became bound to those
terms. The LGPL, often referred to as a "copyleft" license, required the
Wine developers to abide by some guidelines:
Source code (including all changes from the original Wine sources)
must be made available to people who receive a binary of Wine. This
also applies if Wine is used as a library, in which case only the
source of Wine (including all changes) must be made available.
Simply linking with Wine does not mean you need to make the source
code available for your program.
The immediate effect was the creation of the
ReWind
project to further the X11-licensed
codebase. Many key developers agreed to allow their additions to be
used by both the X11 and LGPL Wine code. Most have decided to focus
their efforts on synchronizing with the LGPL'ed Wine and the vast
majority of development and new features appear there first.
Picking a favorite software license is left as an exercise for the reader.
Shortly after changing the license development began to pick up at
a greater pace. More patches began to appear, Alexandre made more CVS
commits, and more applications were reported to work. By the end of 2003
DLL separation achieved a milestone with the split of the kernel32/ntdll
combination. Most of the architectural changes to support a beta release
were in place. Another developer's conference was held in January, 2004
in St. Paul Minnesota sponsored by
CodeWeavers.
Once again, a roadmap was laid out for tasks that needed to be completed.
Wine has grown to over 1.4 million lines of C code over the past
decade. Nearly 700 people have contributed in some fashion. As always,
you can expect Wine to be released sometime this year; or maybe early
next year. Or perhaps we'll just wait for you to become involved
and finish those important user interfaces and documentation bits.
