Thank you!

Wine is the result of many thousands of hours of work by hundreds of talented people. Development thus far has been going on for 12 years and we've seen quite a cast of characters come and go. Many people have left their mark on Wine over the years and for that we'd like to say thank you.

Wine's success is also directly attributable to the benevolence of commercial development. A lot of companies have paid developers to spend time working on Wine and they've graciously given that work back to the community. Not very many free software projects are fortunate enough to have paid staff tackling tough problems.. we are.

CodeWeavers

CodeWeavers' mission is to make Linux a Windows^® -compatible operating system. To that end, they've hired some of the best talent in the Wine community. In fact, many of the large projects recently undertaken by Wine have started as initiatives by CodeWeavers. Some of the different areas they've worked on include TrueType fonts support, internationalization and Unicode, Microsoft Installer support, DCOM support, DLL separation, and gazillions of bug fixes. In 2004 CodeWeavers hosted WineConf 2004 at their offices in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Corel

Corel dedicated a team of paid engineers to the Wine project in 1999. They focused on adding functionality to Wine that let Corel applications, such as WordPerfect, CorelDRAW, and Quattro Pro run on Linux and be ported as native Linux applications. In the past, Corel had relied on conventional porting techniques to move some of its applications (Corel WordPerfect 8) to Linux. This provided a fast way to get these applications to Linux, but meant that porting had to be repeated with each new version. Improving Wine and compiling with Winelib allowed them to consolidate codebases. While Corel ultimately moved on to other projects, they definitely had a positive effect on Wine.

Macadamian

Macadamian was subcontracted by Corel to improve several areas of Wine. For two years engineers spent time improving Wine's windowing, controls and dialogs.

ReactOS

Wine is at the heart of ReactOS' Win32 support. Initial work improved Wine's portability by cleaning things up so MinGW could compile it. From there, a considerable amount of effort was spent improving Wine's shell32 infrastructure and various controls. The ReactOS team is also responsible for the regedit and task manager utilities.

TransGaming

Development efforts at TransGaming, mostly in 2002, improved several critical areas of Wine. Changes to DCOM, DirectDraw and 2D graphics support helped new types of programs to install. Later, the widl utility was donated to act as a MIDL replacement.

...And a cast of hundreds

If you haven't seen the Who's Who list, check that out for a list of major contributors. In addition, the following individuals have spent a considerable amount of time and effort improving Wine. Also note, contributions to "misc" shouldn't be taken lightly. In most cases those folks have submitted enough patches that you can't nail down any particular area of focus.

A complete list of authors can be found in the source code repository.