[Wine] Running XP programs in wine

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 21 February 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> Thank you Tres. I'll start googling the topic, as until now I was
> unaware of the technical details of dlls and such. If I have a legal
> Windows license, then I should be able to use the dlls, no?

Not necessarily. Sometimes there are unusual conditions in the Microsoft 
license for the product, and the do tend to vary a lot.

For the general case, the older the dll, the more likely it is to have a 
license that simply says something like "you can use this stuff if you 
paid" whereas more recent products are more likely to include bizarre 
conditions like "this dll may only be used on a Microsoft platform" - 
which makes usage on Wine technically violate the license.

And some dll's are freely redistributable, like the vb runtime.

In any event, you always have to read the license for the product that 
supplied the dll to see what the exact license says. Assumptions can be 
dangerous.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com