Wine Traffic

Posted Aug 13, 2004 4:26 UTC (Fri) by vinn (guest, #23971)
Parent article: Wine Traffic

Stumbled across this comment.. and no one will likely read my reply.. but here's a stab anyway.

I don't think any of the Wine developers care. Yeah, I've met most of them in person and drank beer with them, so I think I do have a bit of perspective. Quite frankly, I'm not sure anyone other than Alexandre could actually answer this question of what's right. Even then, he'd probably make up his mind based on the current phase of the moon or something as random.

Here's why.

Wine is Not an Emulator is pretty close to describing how it works. However, it sure is vague. If you just saw "Wine: Wine Is Not an Emulator" you'd have no idea what it really did. I think we list this in the FAQ as the 'official' acronym.

However, if you say "Wine: WINdows Emulator", that really gets the point across succinctly. No, it's not really accurate. But it does get the point across that running Windows software is the goal. Emulator itself is a tough word to really nail down. Wine is definitely not a CPU emulator, but it sure does emulate a lot of Windows behavior. These days we're all about trying to make things easier on the user and I think having an easy to grok acronym is part of that.

As Jeremy White recently said, that's my $.02 and with another $1.48 it'll get you a cup of coffee.

-Brian Vincent