WINE to go into beta this week!!
jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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Amazing, I hadn't even realized that WINE was an alpha product in the first place.

:: Quote ::
Jeremy White, Codeweavers founder and a "big booster" of Wine, said the beta release of the software is a watershed event because in addition to user apprehensiveness toward an alpha release, a lack of consistency in the software's function also turned people off. And while Wine, or some form of it, has become common across the Linux universe, 11 years as an alpha is a long time.

"Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software," White said. "This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work." newsforge


This is something that migh fly under the radar, for all the wrong reasons. But think about it, this is the whole thing about real open source projects: they release them when they are done, an alpha is an alpha until it becomes a beta, not because the shipping manager is screaming for an august release to hit the christmas shopping season.

11 years is a long time I'll admit, but my experience with Wine confirms their decision to have left it in alpha this long: wine was simply not adequately stable, successful windows application installs would break on update of wine, version to version was random in functionality.

I'll be looking forwards to seeing how beta looks.

:: Quote ::
The Wine Project, the community of free software developers dedicated to opening Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems to Windows applications, today announced the completion of the core architecture for Wine, an open-source project that allows Windows applications to run natively on Linux. Now available as Wine version 0.9, the tools and libraries are functionally complete and ready for commercial testing and optimization.
From the Wine press release


All I can say is fantastic, great work, amazing project all in all.
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