A copyright question to wine developpers

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 6:50 AM, Christophe-Marie Duquesne <chmd at chmd.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Ricardo Filipe
> <ricardojdfilipe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> yeah, what happens is the header is reimplemented, not simply
>> copy-pasted from Windows.
>> Even if the API is not copyrighted, the header contents still are.
>>
>
> Well if you rewrite a header such that it is 100% compatible with an
> API (which means: 0 change in client code), it has to be very similar
> to the one the API came from.
> - The macros have to be the same, in order to expand the same way in client code
> - The function names have to be the same as well
> - Same goes for the typedefs
> - The header name also has to remain the same.
>
> What can be different:
> - function argument names
> - indentation
> - comments
>
> In the end, it seemed pretty silly to me to do that. But, if that is
> the solution to my copyright problem, I am doing it!
>
>

Have a look at what Google does for the Linux headers in Android. They
essentially process them with a script and remove comments, inline
functions and other stuff. There have been various articles about it.
Look at the argumentation.

Years ago a lot of video games used 3dfx their 'glide' APIs. A number
of people made re-implementations of glide by using the 3dfx glide
SDK. All implementations which used the official headers were taken
down. Again there may be more information about this.

Roderick