No WINE Before Its Time

Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.

Comments

Re:ABRs of OSS

[Doc Ruby]

Anonymous Cowards who don't even read the next sentence shouldn't stick their illiterate snouts into any argument, semantic or otherwise.

Re:Obsolete model?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine is not an emulator :-)

Of course it's an emulator. Whether you're emulating virtual hardware or translating binary instructions, it's still emulation. The last time I tried WINE (around 1998) it sucked ass and I couldn't even get it to run notepad or minesweeper. I doubt it's much better these days since there have been at least four major Windows upgrades since then. WINE is trying to keep up with a target that is moving ahead far faster than it can ever hope to catch up with.