(Initial thoughts posted on Mastodon)

I think Wine (and emulators in general) are going to be key for keeping control of our computers from being wrestled away from us. Personal Computing (not just PCs but computing in general) is being subsumed by cloud providers and subscription models and I for one am not about to give up the idea of Personal Computing.

If there's anything that I've learned from 30+ years in computing is that corporate interests are never in the users long-term interests. Ever.

As Wine improves it gives another way to run Windows programs without requiring Windows itself. Since Windows is becoming a subscription-based operating system (don't kid yourself that it isn't) it'll be much more vital to allow users an opportunity to break away from these models and be able to run whatever software the user chooses.

I used to think that Wine was a convenience but now I'm more convinced of the importance of the project as a whole.