“Wine is software that lets people run Windows applications on
their Linux machines. The Wine team was on hand at the show here in
San Jose, Calif., Thursday to show off the latest version of the
free, open source software, which was released late last month.
One of the goals of Wine is to provide a way for people to
easily transition from Windows to Linux, said Andrew Ridgway,
administrator of the Winehq website. This is a project that is
irrelevant to many Linux users, he said, but will be important if
they want to make Linux a consumer platform.
Corel signed up to help the Wine project last October. In his
keynote Tuesday, Corel president Michael Cowpland said his company
was using Wine to port over its entire suite of productivity
applications to Linux by the end of this year. The Ottawa-based
developer will then push WordPerfect Office 2000 as an alternative
to Microsoft Office. WordPerfect 2000 will include facilities for
porting Office documents and files over to the corresponding Corel
products.
Even more important, Ridgway said, Corel is freely contributing
code and bug fixes to the Wine effort.”