question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Troy Rollo]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 23:07, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> [correct summary of the law deleted]

> As far as Wine is concerned though I can't think of
> any Windows API that:
> 1. Returns pure facts (not having any unique expression)
> 2. Would fulfill the requirement of needed a significant
>    effort to collect to collect the fact.
>
> So no I wouldn't worry about it as far as Wine is concerned.

Unfortunately it appears there may be one: LCMapString. If all the things we 
have discovered about the tables are correct (and I am by no means assuming 
that they are), then the Microsoft sort key table meets the industrious 
collection requirements and returns facts in a way that could not be 
duplicated without duplicating the table (it returns the table entry in 
literal form, so it couldn't even be represented as a different table).

This is what is (generally) returned by LCMapString. The actual table is 
included in an external file under NT (sortkey.nls), so one option (likely 
the best option) would be to implement LCMapString using a standard table 
from unicode.org, then provide a facility so that people in the US and Canada 
can (at their own risk of course) use the Microsoft versions relying on 
Feist.