Wine is a software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows. Wine also provides a software library known as Winelib which developers can compile Windows applications against in order to port them to Unix-like systems.
The name 'Wine' derives from the recursive acronym Wine Is Not an Emulator. While the name sometimes appears in the forms "WINE" and "wine", the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form "Wine".
The Wine developers released the first beta version of Wine (version 0.9) on October 25 2005 after 12 years of development. The Wine developers have listed approximately 100 bugs that need to be fixed before version 1.0 can be released. Released under terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Wine is free software.
