[Wine] Re: Legal Issues

[oiaohm]

army_ant7 As you can see from what vitamin said there is more way to skin a cat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_ActiveX_Control  is what wine internet explorer these days started from.  So its sourced and expanded on top off as applications failed to work with it.   Black box style development.

Wine most common system is called black boxing.  This is not clean rooming.

Clean room is suggesting the code has been disassembled and documented. 

Black boxing is where you do test cases on the unknown closed source section.  Never disassembling the unknown closed source section.   You don't need to know what is inside the black box as long as your replacement to it matches it in function and responses.  If you read MS EULA Black Boxing is not forbin its legal even by the EULA.

You should hear the Reactos people scream about how wine internals don't match up in any way shape or form to a windows NT system.   So yes the evidence exists that wine has been build black box style.

Other sources has been documentation on windows api that may or may not have come from reversing we don't need know and don't need to care.  It legal to use the documentation so it used.

Ie if sections turned out to be build from documentation from disassemble work they would be clean room but its not important for the project to know.

No direct disassemble work is done by the wine project.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi  Basically learn some the terms of reversing and stop being insulting.

You came in here with the complete idea that wine has to be doing something illegal army_ant7.  You are free to look all you want there is nothing illegal here.

Even using winetricks script it warns you about items needing MS licensing that has to be checked on a country by country base.

If anything around wine need there asses kicked its some of the front ends of wine that install parts from MS under EULA's that are illegal to do in some countries and not informing users that it doing this.   That is not a wine problem.