Fedora Stakeholders Look At Potentially Adding PlayOnLinux

Fedora developers have been discussing whether the Wine-powered PlayOnLinux open-source software can be packaged for the distribution.

While Fedora has official Wine packages in their repository, there isn't any PlayOnLinux package at present. PlayOnLinux is powered by Wine and is effectively just a wrapper for making it easy to run Windows games and other applications with Wine while the POL code itself is open-source under the GPL. PlayOnLinux is a great free alternative to CodeWeavers' CrossOver for making an easier-to-use Wine experience.

However, there's mixed feelings whether PlayOnLinux should be allowed in Fedora over their policies regarding emulators, PlayOnLinux makes it easy to download closed-source Windows binaries, and its dependencies upon external bits for being useful. That's all while Wine is happily allowed in Fedora.

The PlayOnLinux for Fedora discussion is taking place in this mailing list thread and was started by Red Hat developer Jiří Konečný. For those who want to use PlayOnLinux right now from Fedora, there's third-party packages including Fedora RPMs.