A copyright question to wine developpers

Christophe-Marie Duquesne chmd at chmd.fr
Mon Jun 11 03:54:34 CDT 2012


Hi,

To my understanding, wine is a reimplementation of the MS system. As
far as I understand, you take MS public headers and reimplement their
functions. If that is how it works, then how do you deal with
copyright? The MS headers certainly come with a copyright clause: how
is it possible to redistribute these headers with wine?

The reason why I ask this: I just rewrote an opensource implementation
of a closed-source library. This opensource implementation is meant to
be fully compatible with the closed source one: I reimplemented all
the functions provided by their header, and anyone using the closed
source one should be able to use my library as a replacement. My
problem, though, is with the distribution of the header: Since I want
to be fully compatible with the closed-source implementation, I have
to, somehow, use the same header. I could probably modify it so that
is *looks* different, but for the compiler, the API *needs* to be the
same.

Since you seem to have the same problem with wine (and you probably
dealt with it succesfully), I wanted to ask you how you are solving
this problem. Do you "rewrite" the headers? Do you copy them "raw"?

Thank you,
Christophe-Marie Duquesne



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