Wabi (software)

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Wabi was a commercial product from Sun Microsystems that implemented the Microsoft Windows Win16 API specification on Solaris; a version for Linux was also released by Caldera Systems. Wabi supported running applications developed for Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, and Windows for Workgroups.

When the technology was originally discussed in the early 1990s, it was implied that Wabi stood for "Windows Application Binary Interface", but before its release Sun declared that it was not an acronym.

Wabi required a Windows 3.x installation in order to work, meaning that it would also require a Windows license, unlike efforts that endeavor to implement the entire Windows API such as Wine.

In conjunction with Wabi, Sun initiated an effort to create an ISO standard, non-proprietary definition of the Windows API. The Public Windows Initiative (PWI) for Windows was intended to be a publicly available standard that would help Sun and other companies that wished to clone the Microsoft Windows programming interface (like Willows' TWIN^[1] another GPL'd implementation of the API^[2]), but even when Sun alleged there was no intellectual property breach, this effort was shot down in 1996 by Microsoft.^[3]

Wabi 2.2B was licensed by Caldera to allow its users to run Windows applications under Linux,^[4] together with the also licensed DOS Merge.

Wabi development was discontinued in December 1997.