On Saturday 09 December 2006 19:14, Alexandre Julliard wrote: > "James Hawkins" <truiken@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > 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. > > That's true only if you restrict your definition of reverse > engineering to disassembling. But there are many other ways to do > reverse engineering, for instance the Samba way of sniffing the wire, > or the Wine way of writing test programs and running them on Windows > to see how the API behaves. Both are considered reverse engineering > by most definitions, and both are legally OK. Seeing as I was the one who sparked off this sub-thread I should respond at this point. The definition of reverse-engineering that I was using is the same one Alexandre used - somehow (by various possible methods) figuring out how an engineered product works or what it does, then making a new and different product to do the same thing. Implied is the factor that this new thing is not a direct copy of the original - that would be a facsimile, duplicate or copy which Wine definitely isn't. There could be many definitions of reverse-engineering and we could debate semantic consequences of no consequence for hours. But this here list isn't slashdot so I don't want to go there :-) At least most of us here know what Wine is, how it works and have a good idea of how it was developed alan _______________________________________________ wine-users mailing list wine-users@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-users
