Wine : It is an open source implementation which allows people to run some Windows program on Linux. The Wine project was started in 1993 as a way to support Windows 3.1 programs running on Linux.

Wine can be think as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on unix/linux. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code.

Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix/linux as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

Benefits of using Wine :

*) If you are much dependent on windows application and you want to implement them on your Unix/Linux box it is possible using Wine; you will enjoy windows flavor with Unix Stability, flexibility, remote administration etc…
*) Wine makes it economical to use thin clients: simply install Wine on a Linux server, you can access these Windows applications from any X terminal.
*) Wine is Open Source, so you can edit-extend code as per your need giving you a customize application.

As the popularity of Linux has been increased tremendously, webmaster want their windows application to run on linux so many companies have took initiative for building and selling fine tuned version of wine. In future most big companies would have to release a Wine version of their product to make it for linux lovers; if it was meant for windows.

One of the latest example of implementation wine is by Google; It has used wine for it’s popular Windows Picasa photo editing to work on linux.

Definitely there is bright future for wine….