Home » Google, Linux, Open Source

Google contributes more code to WINE

7 October 2008 4 Comments

With the recent release of Picasa 3 Beta for Linux, Google has contributed more code to the WINE project.

WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems). It can be thought of as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on 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. With WINE you can run such programs as Microsoft Office and games like Counter Strike on your Linux machine.

Another popular application is Adobe’s Photoshop CS2 and here Google has been very active.

In January 2006, Google (working with CodeWeavers the commerical arm of the WINE project) improved WINE so Picasa 2.2 would run. This effort resulted in 225 patches committed to the WINE project.

Their work continued in 2007, committing a few dozen patches and they also worked again with CodeWeavers to improve Wine so it could run Photoshop CS2 properly. As a result, about 200 patches were committed to the WINE project.

To get Picasa 3 working on Linux, Google has continued to submit fixes to WINE.

Picasa 3 works great on Linux and I think Google and CodeWeavers need a big Hats Off.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post Post to Digg Digg This Post Post to Reddit Reddit Post to StumbleUpon Stumble This Post

4 Comments »

  • Jayson said:

    Nice! Google’s contributions have definitely helped the project come a long way. It’s only a matter of time before WINE becomes a household name.

    # 7 October 2008 at 9:31 pm
  • lowell said:

    codeweavers is not the commercial arm of the wine project.

    # 7 October 2008 at 10:12 pm
  • Jiff Dean said:

    Makes perfect sense to me.

    http://www.privacy.es.tc

    # 8 October 2008 at 12:33 am
  • DosKey said:

    Google continues to help with the development of making Linux usable for everyone, i am so happy to be involved in the Linux community. To watch how it has grown and continues to do so.

    # 8 October 2008 at 2:33 am

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.

CommentLuv Enabled