OpenSource
Register
Advertisement


Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine") is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, named Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.


Warning

If you are attempting to use Wine on your system, please read these warnings.

  • Wine is not isolated from your system.
  • If you can access a file or resource with your user account, programs running in Wine can too.
  • Malware and Viruses targeting Windows can also run on Wine.[1] You may need a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) system (e.g. AppArmor) to sandbox Wine's directory, or using a virtual machine.

Overview[]

The Wine project aims to allow an IBM PC compatible running a Unix-like operating system and the X Window System to execute programs originally written for Microsoft Windows. Alternately, those wishing to port a Windows application to a Unix-like system can compile it against the Wine libraries.

The name 'Wine' derives from the recursive acronym "Wine Is Not an Emulator", although some have used the unofficial expansion "Windows Emulator". While the name sometimes appears in the forms "WINE" and "wine", the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form "Wine". The recursive acronym Wine resembles that of LAME (Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder), and GNU (Gnu's Not Unix).

Wine is free software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The Wine project originally released Wine under the same MIT License as the X Window System, but owing to concern about proprietary versions of Wine not contributing their changes back to the core project, work as of March 2002 has used the LGPL for its licensing.

References[]

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
Advertisement