Fpurl

The folks behind open source Windows API implementation Wine announced on Friday that version 1.0RC1 has been released. While application version numbers are a somewhat arbitrary measure, this seems like a good time to celebrate the maturity of this project, which has been active for 15 years now. For organizations and users committed to open source operating systems, but still needing specific Windows applications, Wine is an essential lifeline.

As of this writing, the bug list for version 1.0 still has 36 bugs on it - though some of those are likely to be postponed before the release. There are specific release criteria for Wine 1.0, the chief of which is that applications that ran well under 0.9.5 should not regress under 1.0. That's a set of about 1200 Windows applications (mostly games) that have been placed in the "Platinum" compatibility category - a not insignificant achievement. For more on this, see Joe's post.

Like most open source projects, Wine is currently calling for help - though unlike most, it's not currently begging for new coders. Rather, they'd like anyone with a bit of spare time to get involved in their Platinum Regression Hunt - checking some of those applications to make sure they're still running well under 1.0. If you've been wanting to help out on a prominent open source project but lack coding chops, this is a great opportunity.

There will always be people who pooh-pooh Wine as an attempt to replicate an operating system that many would rather see eliminated. But that misses the very real service that they do to those who, for business reasons, need to run Windows applications that don't have good free software equivalents yet (not to mention numerous game players).