In the beginning...

What gave you the idea to start a project like Wine?

The project was started back in 1993, shortly after the birth of Linux. At that point Linux was showing great promise as an OS, but of course there were no end-user applications; so with a group of early Linux users, we got together and decided to see if it would be possible to make the myriad of available Windows applications run somehow. We found that it was possible, even if it has been a lot more work than expected at the beginning.

Wine stands for, ironically, Wine Is Not an Emulator. Why did you pick such a name for your project?

The name is of course a joke, along the lines of Gnu's Not Unix, but it also makes the point that there is no hardware or CPU emulation going on in Wine. Windows programs run under Wine exactly as they would under Windows, with no performance impact. This means that unlike with virtual machine solutions, applications can run under Wine as fast (and in some cases faster) than under Windows.

What kept you motivated? Did you really expect to get as far as you have today?

Part of the motivation is of course the challenge of doing something that most people would have considered impossible. For me another motivation is working with all the contributors, receiving new patches and new ideas every day and having to keep up with that. And of course the fact that many users are able to do useful things with our work (even if we mostly hear from users when things break...)

I can't say that when starting this I expected to still be working on it 15 years later. I had always believed that we could get as far as we are now, but I probably didn't expect that it would take that long. But as long as it's fun, I don't see any reason to stop...

How many people are currently working on the Wine project?

There are probably around 50 active developers at the moment. Over the course of the project there have been over 1000 contributors altogether.

You are employed by Codeweavers, who also sponsors the Wine project. How does this cooperation work out? What does the sponsorship from Codeweavers allow you to do now which you couldn't do before?

The cooperation is mostly that Codeweavers pays Wine developers to work on improving Wine; this way they can hack Wine all day long instead of having to do it only in their spare time. This means of course that Wine can progress a lot faster. We now have about ten full-time Wine developers working at Codeweavers.

One thing I'm careful about is to not let Codeweavers have any control over my decisions as Wine maintainer. I view my work at Codeweavers and my work as Wine maintainer as completely separate, and my decisions as maintainer are based purely on what I consider best for Wine, even if it's sometimes not what would be best for Codeweavers. In general of course the interests are aligned, since it's in Codeweavers best interest that Wine become as good as possible.

If I've understood this correctly, Crossover includes some proprietary code which makes it run some applications better and faster than regular Wine. What kind of code is this, and is it code that eventually will end up in Wine as open-source?

Actually there's no proprietary Wine code in Crossover, all the Wine code is LGPL. The only proprietary part is the GUI that manages the installation of applications. The only difference between Crossover Wine and the public Wine is that we have a few hacks that are not suitable for inclusion in the main tree, mostly because they help one app but break another; but we try to keep the code bases as close as possible. There is certainly nothing magical about Crossover that cannot be done with plain Wine, it just makes things easier.