A copyright question to wine developpers

Edward Savage epssyis at gmail.com
Mon Jun 11 04:04:49 CDT 2012


On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Christophe-Marie Duquesne <chmd at chmd.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> To my understanding, wine is a reimplementation of the MS system. As
> far as I understand, you take MS public headers and reimplement their
> functions. If that is how it works, then how do you deal with
> copyright? The MS headers certainly come with a copyright clause: how
> is it possible to redistribute these headers with wine?
>
> The reason why I ask this: I just rewrote an opensource implementation
> of a closed-source library. This opensource implementation is meant to
> be fully compatible with the closed source one: I reimplemented all
> the functions provided by their header, and anyone using the closed
> source one should be able to use my library as a replacement. My
> problem, though, is with the distribution of the header: Since I want
> to be fully compatible with the closed-source implementation, I have
> to, somehow, use the same header. I could probably modify it so that
> is *looks* different, but for the compiler, the API *needs* to be the
> same.
>
> Since you seem to have the same problem with wine (and you probably
> dealt with it succesfully), I wanted to ask you how you are solving
> this problem. Do you "rewrite" the headers? Do you copy them "raw"?
>
> Thank you,
> Christophe-Marie Duquesne
>

I wouldn't have a clue about France or my own country however it now
appears rather clear cut to developers in the United States.  You'd
assume this is the common sense ruling that should follow any action
of this type in other countries though.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/31/237208/judge-rules-apis-can-not-be-copyrighted

Have you considered talking to your local version of the EFF?

Edward



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