M-Dollar: Wine's 12 year climb to Beta, soon to be Apple's best friend?: "Wine's 12 year climb to Beta, soon to be Apple's best friend?

This past Tuesday Wine—the open source implementation of the Windows API—went into Beta with the 0.9 release. In case you don't know about Wine is, here's what they've got to say:

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Wine has come a long way, which is what you would expect for one of open source software's oldest projects. This LWN.net article tells you quite a bit about what the update contains so I won't repeat all of that here.

Wine has been hailed as a significant strategy element in the quest for ubiquitous Linux desktops, but the promise of an open source solution for running Windows apps on Linux has fallen short of the ideal. Does 0.9 show new life and promise?

I think it does, although I have yet to take it for a spin (I plan to this weekend). However, one thing that I think merits mentioning is how Wine, and Darwine for that matter, may take on a new significance once Apple is on x86. With a shared CPU architecture, it got just that much easier to run Windows apps on a Mac. While long-time Mac users may not care about this, you have to wonder how this might influence a potential Switcher."