InstallShield and ole question...
Gavriel State
gav at transgaming.com
Tue May 1 08:38:51 CDT 2001
Dan Kegel wrote:
>
> Jeremy White wrote:
> > With COM, the other issue is that someone needs to look at the MS patents
> > in this area. Mainsoft is telling people that they can't use Wine to
> > port COM code, because Microsoft holds patents on some of the Vtable
> > logic used in COM (and no, I don't have any more detail than that,
> > this came to me third hand).
> > I've also asked the FSF for help tracking this FUD down and refuting it.
>
> For the curious:
> Snooping on his conversation using google.com, I see it's patent number
> 5297284 he's worried about.
>
> http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F5297284
Hmmm - a few points to consider:
1) The patent seems very much oriented towards compilers for object
oriented languages. I'm not sure how broadly that patent can be
applied to code like ours that uses C to mimic the behaviour of
a OO language. If there's an issue anywhere, I'd suspect that
it's with g++, not Wine.
2) Even with g++, the work described in the patent that's actually new
(ie: wasn't implemented in other C++ compilers as of April 1991) mostly
seems to cover multiple inheritance related issues - adjusting the
this pointer to the right part of an MI object's vtable, etc. Since
a COM interface is nothing but a flat array of function pointers,
I fail to see any relevance at all to the Wine side of things.
3) At least some of the g++ people seem to know something about this
patent. There's a small thread here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/1999-08/msg00862.html
And there's some further discussion wrt the ia64 C++ abi here:
http://reality.sgi.com/dehnert_engr/cxx/cxx-closed.html
4) G++ was around for quite some time prior to the patent application.
You can download an archival copy of g++ 1.39.0, which predates the
patent here:
http://planetmirror.com/pub/gcc/old-releases/gcc-1/?N=D
Anyhow, this is just from a very cursory analysis, but I'd say that the
Mainsoft FUD is just that: FUD.
-Gav
--
Gavriel State, CEO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
http://www.transgaming.com
gav at transgaming.com
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