[Wine] Re: Difference Between WINE and an Emulator

[James Hawkins]

On 12/9/06, Nick Law <nlaw at nildram.co.uk> wrote:
> James Hawkins wrote:
> > On 12/8/06, Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
> >> On Friday 08 December 2006 13:48, Jens Gulden wrote:
> >> > WINE is an operating-system running in user-space. It smashes the
> >> > usual dichotomy "a piece of software is either an operating system or
> >> > an application". WINE is _both_ an OS _and_ an application. At first
> >> > sight a joke for computer-scientists, but probably the most ingenious
> >> > idea in the history of software-development yet...
> >>
> >> Not only that but it's also a truly astounding piece of
> >> reverse-engineering.
> >>
> >
> > Wine was not developed using reverse engineering...that would be illegal.
> >
> I don't thing the statement regarding reverse engineering being illegal
> is strictly true, it depends on the circumstances, why your doing it,
> what your doing it on and under which countries Law's your talking
> about.. Quoted from Wikipedia which gives not only wine but also samba &
> openoffice as examples. As I understand it reverse engineering is
> considered fair use (as long as you don't copy the code or circumvent
> restrictions) you just study it to determine how it works then implement
> your representation. It also depends which continent your on. Here's a
> nice explanation from a European patent & copyright company.
>

Whether it's 'strictly' true or not doesn't matter.  The only way
reverse engineering can be used to implement Wine, without legal
ramifications, is for one person or team to reverse engineer Microsoft
binaries and then write up documentation for the particular APIs they
reversed.  Then another team uses that documentation to implement the
APIs.  If one person reverse engineers the API and then turns around
and implements that API, that's definitely not legitimate, and we can
be sued if, say, Microsoft found out and cared about it.  One could
argue that we could fight it out in court, and possibly win [1], but I
don't think anyone on this project has the funds to do that.

[1] http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v4n2/mishra42.html#[50]n

"On July 22 1993 the Cultural Affairs Agency announced that they were
considering amending there Copyright Act to allow software developers
to decompile computer software. However, the Agency backed down due to
considerable US pressure. The US government maintained its
protectionist position to computer software. This is despite the
recent US Federal court decisions in Sega v Accolade[50] and Atari v
Nintendo[51] affirming that decompilation constituted a fair use in
limited circumstances."

>  http://www.jenkins-ip.com/serv/serv_6.htm
>
> Strangely European law is stricter about reverse engineering than US Law
> which I find surprising.
>

If european law is stricter than US law, which doesn't allow reverse
engineering, then we really shouldn't be doing it.

> You don't think Microsoft reverse engineer
> (study somebody else products to try to figure out how they work) when
> the need arises ?
>

I'm sure Microsoft has done that at some point in time (or many), but
that doesn't make it legal.

> "This process is sometimes termed /Reverse Code Engineering/ or RCE. As
> an example, decompilation of binaries for the Java platform  can be
> accomplished using ArgoUML . One famous case of reverse engineering was
> the first non-IBM  implementation of BIOS which launched the historic PC
> clone industry.
>
> In the United States , the Digital Millennium Copyright Act  exempts
> from the circumvention ban some acts of reverse engineering aimed at
> interoperability of file formats and protocols, but judges in key cases
> have ignored this law, since it is acceptable to circumvent restrictions
> for use, but not for access. Aside from restrictions on circumvention,
> reverse engineering of software is protected in the U.S. by the fair use
> exception in copyright law.
>
> The Samba software, which allows systems that are not running Microsoft
> Windows systems to share files with systems that are, is a classic
> example of software reverse engineering, since the Samba project had to
> reverse-engineer unpublished information about how Windows file sharing
> worked, so that non-Windows computers could emulate it. The Wine project
> does the same thing for the Windows API, and OpenOffice.org is one party
> doing this for the Microsoft Office file formats."
>

As far as I know, Samba 'reverse engineered' using packet sniffers,
which isn't illegal.  Wine should be taken off that site.

Bottom line is, we don't accept code that was written as a result of
reverse engineering.  Check out [2] for a project that is failing as a
result of such practices, and is now doing a code audit to check for
leaked NT sources and reverse engineered code.

[2] http://reactos.org/en/index.html

-- 
James Hawkins