Everything we do at CodeWeavers revolves around the Open Source Wine Project. We contribute all of our work on Wine back to the Wine Project. In fact, CodeWeavers developers make up for 2/3 of the Wine commits. The majority of the development we do goes into Wine first, before it becomes part of our commercial product CrossOver. You can support the Wine Project by purchasing CrossOver or donating directly to the WineHQ website that CodeWeavers hosts.
Wine is an open-source project that provides a compatibility layer used to run Windows applications on other operating systems like macOS, Linux, and Android. Unlike virtual machines or emulators, Wine translates the calls a Windows system would recognize so that the application can run at a near native quality. This method makes it possible to run games and applications without major memory and performance penalties and makes the application feel and interact as though it were ported to be native on the system of your choice. In some cases, Wine does this so well that the target application runs better in Wine than it does in Windows.
WineConf 2015, fondly termed Wine-StagingConf 2015, took place at the InterCity Hotel in Vienna, Austria. This conference was a major turning point in Wine's history because it recognized Wine-Staging as part of the development process. Patches committed to Wine-Staging get the added benefit of help from Wine Developers who are willing to work through the patch approval process. This means work that is not yet ready for Wine is not lost. Further, the Wine community recognized the need to update the stable version of Wine for various Linux distributions to depend on. Since the conference, the stable version of Wine has been maintained with the best fixes from the development branch and is in continuous heavy use.
Curious about WineConf? Join the mailing list at https://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf