[Wine] Re: Legal Issues

[army_ant7]

Oh! Sorry for the misunderstanding. It's just that the first part of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29 says, that part of Wine was done by clean rooming and most, I think, by black boxing.

I'm not sure about the definitions of both designs, but here goes. Clean rooming is a type of reverse engineering without knowledge of how a proprietary program was made to work, according to Wikipedia. But when I looked at the definition of reverse engineering, which I know some EULA's prohibit, it said something about checking the source code of a program to see how it was made.

Black boxing is just making a program from scratch, but copying the functions of a program without checking its source code.

Please clarify clean rooming. If my definitions are wrong or lacking, I would greatly appreciate corrections. I'm a little confused though. How do you prove that you haven't ever looked at the source code of the program you're black boxing?

BTW, isn't Direct3D proprietary? I'm just wondering why it's incorporated into Wine.

I'm a real newb, but I'm striving to learn more. Thanks for everything so far to everyone who's helped. I also hope that other people are benefiting from this. Merry Christmas!

P.S. Thanks to Danila Sentiabov for clearing up the misconception in Wikipedia! :-D