[Wine] Re: Difference Between WINE and an Emulator

[Nick Law]

James Hawkins wrote:
> On 12/8/06, Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
>> On Friday 08 December 2006 13:48, Jens Gulden wrote:
>> > WINE is an operating-system running in user-space. It smashes the
>> > usual dichotomy "a piece of software is either an operating system or
>> > an application". WINE is _both_ an OS _and_ an application. At first
>> > sight a joke for computer-scientists, but probably the most ingenious
>> > idea in the history of software-development yet...
>>
>> Not only that but it's also a truly astounding piece of
>> reverse-engineering.
>>
>
> Wine was not developed using reverse engineering...that would be illegal.
>
I don't thing the statement regarding reverse engineering being illegal 
is strictly true, it depends on the circumstances, why your doing it, 
what your doing it on and under which countries Law's your talking 
about.. Quoted from Wikipedia which gives not only wine but also samba & 
openoffice as examples. As I understand it reverse engineering is 
considered fair use (as long as you don't copy the code or circumvent 
restrictions) you just study it to determine how it works then implement 
your representation. It also depends which continent your on. Here's a 
nice explanation from a European patent & copyright company.

 http://www.jenkins-ip.com/serv/serv_6.htm

Strangely European law is stricter about reverse engineering than US Law 
which I find surprising.  You don't think Microsoft reverse engineer 
(study somebody else products to try to figure out how they work) when 
the need arises ?

"This process is sometimes termed /Reverse Code Engineering/ or RCE. As 
an example, decompilation of binaries for the Java platform  can be 
accomplished using ArgoUML . One famous case of reverse engineering was 
the first non-IBM  implementation of BIOS which launched the historic PC 
clone industry.

In the United States , the Digital Millennium Copyright Act  exempts 
from the circumvention ban some acts of reverse engineering aimed at 
interoperability of file formats and protocols, but judges in key cases 
have ignored this law, since it is acceptable to circumvent restrictions 
for use, but not for access. Aside from restrictions on circumvention, 
reverse engineering of software is protected in the U.S. by the fair use 
exception in copyright law.

The Samba software, which allows systems that are not running Microsoft 
Windows systems to share files with systems that are, is a classic 
example of software reverse engineering, since the Samba project had to 
reverse-engineer unpublished information about how Windows file sharing 
worked, so that non-Windows computers could emulate it. The Wine project 
does the same thing for the Windows API, and OpenOffice.org is one party 
doing this for the Microsoft Office file formats."