Linus Torvalds on Wine back in 1998

[Dan Kegel]

http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Computers/Linux/Manifesto.txt

It's taken longer than he expected...

--- snip ---
WINE (the Linux
emulator for Windows) works to a fairly surprising degree. You can
run real Windows programs with it, but some of them don't look right,
and some of them just crash. But it has been making big progress in
the last year, and now you can actually run Word for Windows. It
doesn't work for everybody and there are known bugs, but it's almost
becoming usable. I doubt people will wake up and say, "Hey, let's get
rid of the shackles of Microsoft and switch to Linux and WINE." But
there are going to be more and more people who discover they really
want the networking abilities of Linux, or who run a web server on
it. WINE slowly expands the group of people who would find Linux or
some other operating system acceptable because they really don't care
about Microsoft per se; they care about a few programs.

In a few years WINE will be good enough that you can actually
consider running Linux instead of Windows. It won't take over 100% of
the market, but that's OK, too, because when you don't have one major
entity that owns most of the market, it's a much saner, competitive
environment. I think that'll happen, regardless of Linux.
--- snip ---