wintab.dll: Copyright & trademark issues.

Robert North 7ownq0k402 at sneakemail.com
Sat Nov 23 17:50:12 CST 2002


Patrik Stridvall ps-at-leissner.se |Wine Mailing Lists| wrote:

>>As I mentioned in an e-mail a couple of days back,
>>I'm about to start implemening a version of wintab.dll.
>>First I want to ask about legal issues:
>>
>>1. trademark issues.
>>
>>wintab is a trademark.
>>Does this impact on the ability to implement wintab.dll
>>    
>>
>
>No, I can't see how.
>
>Everything we will reasonable do with the name are either unrelated to
>trademarks or are used in reference to what is protected by the
>trademark.
>
Which is what I assumed.
Of couse I wanted to move beyond assumption.

>
>  
>
>>2. API header files.
>>Please look at the licence for the API files, avaialable at the 
>>following URL:
>>http://www.pointing.com/Wintab/WTKIT126.ZIP
>>Does this allow our use of the headers, in Wine?
>>Does it allow the use of fragments of the headers in Wine?
>>    
>>
>
>>From the headers:
>< The text and information contained in this file may be freely used,
>< copied, or distributed without compensation or licensing restrictions.
>
>So the headers are basicly public domain. Specifically it is compatible
>with the X11 license and the LGPL so no problem. We could include the
>files as they are without any modification at all as far as copyright
>is concerned. Presumably we might need some compiler related fixes though.
>
>  
>
>>This is not too much of an issue, as I understand it's OK to re-write
>>compatible headers "In your own words".
>>    
>>
>
>True.
> 
>  
>
>>3. I am in the UK, how does this affect the copyright/trademark issues
>>above?
>>    
>>
>
>It is not likely to matter very much almost regardless of there you are
>in the world, copyright and trademark laws are usually not that different.
>UK is pretty normal AFAIK.
> 
>  
>
>>Ok, some background about wintab:
>>wintab.dll is an "open industry standard"  API
>>developed by a group of tablet manufacturers, and seems to
>>be currently maintained by the company LCS/Telegraphics.
>>Web page for wintab: http://www.pointing.com/WINTAB.HTM
>>LCS/Telegraphics home: http://www.pointing.com/LCS.HTM
>>    
>>
>
>OK. Seem to contain documentation and other things nessary
>or useful for implementing.
>
>I can see two issues though.
>1. It is not an offical Microsoft DLL so should it be part of Wine or not?
>   IMHO yes, it seems to be widely used. However Alexandre decides.
>
Interesting point.
I'd like it to be part of wine.

>2. How do you expect to implement this presumably very complicted DLL?
>   Does Linux have some special libraries for supporting tablets?
>
I was going to discuss this in some more technical e-mails, but I'll
give a quick run down of the issues as I see them this minute.

Initially I'll only attempt to implement enough of wintab to get it 
working on Painter5, and Photoshop6.
To this end I'll intially only implement the features these apps require.

In X11, tablets are handled by the XInput X extension.
The quesiton is how to get XInput messages into the wintab format, and 
wintab-style of
data acquisition.

After that there's the question of how the dll provides the messages to 
it's clients.

The dll also provides a lot of detail about the capabilities of a tablet.
This must be at mininmum mocked up.
It will eventually need some config files/registry data to map X11 info 
to wintab.

Then there's the wintab contexts, which describe the areas of screen an 
app is interested in receiving messages for.
These are quite compex, but I think a few assumptions may allow them to 
work for simple applications.

The key thing is not to implement everything, and to identify subsets of 
the wintab features that will provide some or all of the features
required by the target applications.


I'll go into some more detail about the above soon.
If there's anything in particular in the above that you want my thoughts 
on, please say.
Many thanks
    -Rob.




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