Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes the Mozilla ActiveX Control

[Scott Ritchie]

Greetings,

As part of my work to create the ultimate works-out-of-the-box Wine
package, I've begun to ponder the idea of including the Mozilla ActiveX
control inside the Wine package.  Currently, to install applications
that use Internet Explorer internally, such as Steam, the user has to
download the Mozilla ActiveX control as a tar file and then manually
register the DLL to get Wine to use it (see the Howto in the AppDB entry
here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=1554 )

Modifying Wine to recognize when the Mozilla ActiveX Control is
installed without having to register it manually should be easy enough,
however distributing it with the Wine package or as a separate side
package presents an unusual licensing issue.

Now, the Mozilla ActiveX control is freely licensed, and we can
redistribute it however we please.  Unfortunately, to make it work in
Wine we also need to use the dlls for the Microsoft Foundation Classes
that it's written in such as msvcp70.dll, as Wine does not currently
implement those.

These files have an unusual license.  Someone who owns the compiler
(such as MSVC 7) is allowed to distribute them, however redistribution
further from there isn't necessarily allowed, as the person receiving
the file doesn't have a license to redistribute like the EULA for the
compiler grants.  This doesn't seem to prevent us from giving out the
package with the DLL included, however users wouldn't be able to
redistribute it.

This sounds much like the way the situation is with the NVidia drivers.
Would building the package be the right way to go here, with the
ultimate destination being the restricted copyright repository in
Ubuntu?  Or is there something I'm overlooking here (perhaps reading the
license wrong)?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie