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My antivirus/malware protection software says the Wine download is a virus - why is that?

Please rest assured that downloads from our website are virus-free.  However, it is a common problem and well known that antivirus developers do not care about Wine and Windows software in their scanning procedures. 

The following explanation addresses specific concerns about the Wine installer, which is the more common concern.  

We have not built Wine on our own but only use the official available binary Wine version which has been compiled and built by the Wine team (https://www.winehq.org). Our Wine installation package is a convenient wrapper around the core build of Wine in order to provide a convenient installation solution for our software.

We have certified our software with this Wine version.
As you see from the Wine page Wine is hosted by the company CodeWeavers and is the core of their commercial product CrossOver. The core of CrossOver is Wine.

The infected files which AVAST reports are those of the core of Wine. They are not infected. The only option is to exclude the files in the antivirus scan.

We would like to refer to the professional consideration and discussion of CodeWeavers how to exclude Wine files from not being identified as malware. Please see https://www.codeweavers.com/support/wiki/mac/mactutorial/bitdefender

For our WineHQ package in step 2 the paths which need to be excluded in a virus scan are

/Applications/Wine Devel . app
/Users/(your home folder)/.WineHQ_Notation_Software

Please add these exceptions to the Avast settings as shown in the link.

In order to restart from scratch please execute the Wine installation as shown in the video with the AVAST scan turned off as indicated in the CodeWeaver's link. Here's the video of the Wine installation https://www.notation.com/Tutorial%20Videos/MAC_Installation_4/Mac_Installation_4.mp4

Add the exceptions to AVAST

Switch on AVAST again
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We know that this note might not convince everybody but is the only option which we (and CodeWeavers) have. We had several discussion with the scanning software people. They simply do not listen.

If you have any further concerns, please contact us directly at support@notation.com