Recomp / OS & system / Windows
Wine
Compatibility layer that reimplements the Windows API so Windows programs run on POSIX systems without a Windows licence.
Clean-room Human-led releasedFacts
- Original
- Microsoft Windows API (1985)
- Platform
- Windows
- Method
- Clean-room
- Provenance
- Human-led · Volunteer and CodeWeavers-backed project since 1993 what this means
- Status
- released
- Licence
- LGPL-2.1-or-later
- Team
- Wine project, CodeWeavers
- Started
- 1993
- First release
- 2008-06
- Runs on
- Linux, macOS, FreeBSD
- Needs the original
- No
How to get it legally
Download it from the official repository or website. No original files are needed.
This project was rebuilt clean-room by Wine project, CodeWeavers. Facts last checked 2026-10-13.
Timeline
Sources
Related
All os & system →Darling
Apple macOS (Darwin userland)
Translation layer that runs macOS command-line and some GUI programs on Linux by reimplementing Darwin and macOS frameworks.
Mono
Microsoft .NET Framework
Open-source implementation of the .NET runtime and class libraries, built from the ECMA standards; development has since moved on.
NTFS-3G
Microsoft NTFS file system
Read/write NTFS driver built from reverse engineering of the on-disk format, running in user space via FUSE.
ReactOS
Microsoft Windows NT (Server 2003 era)
Free operating system written from scratch to be binary-compatible with Windows NT drivers and applications.
Samba
Microsoft SMB/CIFS and Active Directory protocols
Reverse-engineered implementation of Windows file and print sharing and Active Directory domain services.