Looking ahead

Do you think Wine will play an important role in the future?

My hope is that someday Wine will stop playing a role, because Windows will be dead and nobody will need Wine anymore... However, that is far in the future, and in the meantime I do think Wine has a very important role to play, by making it easier for people to start using alternative to Windows without having to give up all their applications at the same time, which for most people is not an option.

Jon Parshall, COO at Codeweavers, once told me that Crossover has about 150.000 users, and that the number of Wine users is about eight times that. Are you proud of the popularity of the project? Do you think the number of users will continue to grow?

Certainly, it's very gratifying to hear that the work we do is useful to so many people, that's a big motivation to continue. I definitely expect the number of users to continue to grow, as alternative operating systems like Linux and Mac OS become more popular.

This might be a bit overdue, but congratulations on your stable 1.0 release of Wine. What has 1.0 ment for the development?

For the development, 1.0 marks the point where all the basic infrastructure is in place, and provides a solid foundation for the future. The release process itself, with the code freeze and the testing period, has been an opportunity for us to fix a number of long-standing bugs, and I'm fairly happy with the end result.

For users, 1.0 is signalling that Wine is now at a point where it can actually be useful. We are now out of the "promising but not working" state that we've been in for so long. Of course there are still bugs, and applications that do not work, so our job is not quite done yet, 1.0 is only a beginning.

Do you ever think Wine will "catch-up" with Windows' features? To clarify, do you ever think Wine will get to a point where it will support all the features of Windows X by the time Windows Y gets out?

In general we are not very concerned about Windows releases, since we don't use any part of Windows itself. What matters for Wine is what features the applications use, and new features only trickle slowly into applications since they need to run on older Windows versions for a long time after a new version is released. So in general we have plenty of time to catch up with new releases.

Do you ever think Windows will lose enough users that Windows eventually will need something as Wine, to run Linux apps in Windows?

In a sense that's already happening, there are many applications that have been developed for Unix and then ported to Windows, and there are tools like Cygwin to make the process easier. It's not a strict equivalent to Wine however, since most Unix applications come with source, so it's a lot easier to port them by recompiling than by trying to run actual Linux binaries on Windows.

Google has been implementing Wine in some of their products for Linux-support. Do you see the use of wine in this fashion increase? Is this a good or bad thing?

That's definitely a good thing, Wine has improved a lot as a result of Google's involvement. We are certainly seeing more companies using Wine this way, it's a good way to quickly release a Linux version of a product to test the market and see if it's worth investing into a full Linux port. A good example is the Chrome browser: using Wine, Codeweavers was able to release a Linux version of the browser within days of the Windows release, while the native Linux port is still months away.

Is there anything else you can think of that hasn't already been covered in this interview?

No, I think that's all. Thank you for reading this far!

We thank Alexandre for his time and patience and wish him the best of luck on his future endeavours.