[Wine] Re: Difference Between WINE and an Emulator

[Alexandre Julliard]

"James Hawkins" <truiken at gmail.com> writes:

> Whether it's 'strictly' true or not doesn't matter.  The only way
> reverse engineering can be used to implement Wine, without legal
> ramifications, is for one person or team to reverse engineer Microsoft
> binaries and then write up documentation for the particular APIs they
> reversed.  Then another team uses that documentation to implement the
> APIs.  If one person reverse engineers the API and then turns around
> and implements that API, that's definitely not legitimate, and we can
> be sued if, say, Microsoft found out and cared about it.  One could
> argue that we could fight it out in court, and possibly win [1], but I
> don't think anyone on this project has the funds to do that.

That's true only if you restrict your definition of reverse
engineering to disassembling. But there are many other ways to do
reverse engineering, for instance the Samba way of sniffing the wire,
or the Wine way of writing test programs and running them on Windows
to see how the API behaves. Both are considered reverse engineering by
most definitions, and both are legally OK.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org