[Wine] Running XP programs in wine

[Dotan Cohen]

On 21/02/2008, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 21 February 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>  > Thank you Tres. I'll start googling the topic, as until now I was
>  > unaware of the technical details of dlls and such. If I have a legal
>  > Windows license, then I should be able to use the dlls, no?
>
>
> Not necessarily. Sometimes there are unusual conditions in the Microsoft
>  license for the product, and the do tend to vary a lot.
>
>  For the general case, the older the dll, the more likely it is to have a
>  license that simply says something like "you can use this stuff if you
>  paid" whereas more recent products are more likely to include bizarre
>  conditions like "this dll may only be used on a Microsoft platform" -
>  which makes usage on Wine technically violate the license.
>
>  And some dll's are freely redistributable, like the vb runtime.
>
>  In any event, you always have to read the license for the product that
>  supplied the dll to see what the exact license says. Assumptions can be
>  dangerous.

Interestingly enough, I do not have access to the EULA of my version
of Windows! I was force-sold the OS through Dell when I bought my
Inspiron laptop. There is no paper EULA, and I cannot read the version
on the disk without installing it from scratch! I wonder if this
inability to read the EULA invalidates it.

As there is no technical reason not to use the MS dll's, which may or
may not be licensed for such but MS provides no way of reading the
license, I dare to use them. Note that _all_ the software and media on
my computer are properly licensed and this is the first time in about
three years that I walk on potentially ill-licensed software. I'm no
pirate, and I expect that if a company wishes me to respect their
license, they should make the license available.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?