Of Picasa, Wine and Linux
What is notable is that it doesn’t seem to have taken a lot of time or effort to produce this port. They used Wine, which is an open source tool you can use to run Windows programs under Linux. Generally speaking, if you grab a random Windows app and try to run it using Wine, you’ll get imperfect results. Close, but no cigar. But if an application’s developers work with the Wine developers, they can usually get an app running smoothly with much, much less effort than it would take to create a native Linux version from scratch.
The point here is that this is a technique which educational software vendors can also use to quickly and inexpensively create functional Linux versions of their Windows apps. And they will be doing so more and more in coming years. Just watch.