Introducing Wine

Could you please introduce yourself for our readers?

My name is Alexandre Julliard, I'm 38, I'm the maintainer of the Wine project, and have been for 14 years now. In my day job I'm the CTO of Codeweavers, where I mostly work on Wine too.

For the portion of our readers who haven't heard of Wine, could you present the software?

Wine is a reimplementation of the Windows libraries on top of Unix; it lets you run existing Windows programs on a Unix system, mostly Linux but also Mac OS, Solaris, FreeBSD. Unlike virtual machine solutions, since Wine is a complete reimplementation it doesn't use any Microsoft libraries and doesn't require a Microsoft Windows license.

Do you only work with Wine? Is it possible to earn a living working with open-source?

Yes, essentially all of my work is Wine development, and all the code I write is released as open source; and that's true for all of the Codeweavers developers. So it's clearly possible to earn a living with open source, even if it's not always the easiest way...

You also work at Codeweavers, who got their own commercial version of Wine called Crossover. What would you recommend new Linux users to get? Crossover or Wine?

For new users, Crossover is probably the best choice, since it's easier to use. Wine has made a lot of progress in that area, but it's still more complicated, mainly because it isn't restricted to supporting a small subset of applications.

Do you use Wine yourself?

No, the irony is that at this point I have no real use for Wine myself, there are Linux applications for everything I need to do. So I only ever run Windows applications in order to test Wine, not to actually use them.

After all this time creating a compatibility layer for Windows applications, what do you think of Windows?

The quality of Windows is really bad; most of the APIs are badly designed, full of bugs and inconsistent behaviours, and cumbersome to use. The documentation is poor; it has improved a bit after the legal trouble that Microsoft has been through, but it's still far from good.

Most Windows applications are also full of bugs, mainly because Windows tries hard to hide application bugs to give the impression that everything is working fine, even when it isn't. Running an application under Wine is in fact a good way to find bugs in it; of course we then have to add workarounds to hide the bugs, like Windows does.