Wine legalities

[Vincent Béron]

Le mar 01/02/2005 à 22:46, Scott Ritchie a écrit :
> Also on this topic came the subject of diff files.  IIRC someone wanted
> to include them to help users make use of Microsoft headers that needed
> a bit of tweaking.
> 
> Are diff files that are patches to Microsoft code legal to be
> distributed?  They have bits of Microsoft code in them, but are they a
> derivative work?

For diff files, it depends if there is some context and if you change
some lines or only add/remove some.

It's perfectly possible (even if not much readable afterwards) to not
have any context lines, to inject #if 0/#endif pairs around lines to
remove, and to simply add lines to be added. I think it could be argued
that the resulting diff isn't based on the original file (only line
numbers are referenced), as it can be applied without error to any file
having at least the same number of lines. Of course, the results will
probably be useless unless you apply it to the original file.

If you need to modify part of a line, then it's much more tricky, and I
don't think it's a good idea to publish your resulting diff.

Instructions about what to change most probably fall into the same pot
as diff files, even if they are not as automated.

Of course, IANAL and YMMV.

Vincent