Avautuma

Practical Technology: When is an open-source project ready?

WINE, everyone’s favorite way to run Windows programs on Linux, just reached 1.0 status after 15-years in the making. Its developers freely admit that while it’s very, very good at what it does, it’s far from perfect. None-the-less, many of us, including yours truly, have been using WINE for more than a decade.

Is it ready? It’s not only been ready, it’s been useful for years. It’s also only now a 1.0 release.

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Vista, even after the release of SP1, isn’t ready for serious work. Going back in history, anyone who ever used Windows NT, knows NT wasn’t really usable until NT 4 SP3 appeared. This came years after NT was first ‘released.’