The potential for copyright infringement (or at least the appearance of copyright infringement) would be too high. Better to keep a “clean room” approach in the wine project to avoid attracting Microsoft’s ire.
WINE is a compatibility layer (famously, WINE Is Not an Emulator) for Windows APIs on posix OSes; most notably this allows you to run Windows applications on Linux.
Microsoft would truly love to beat WINE to death with a legal sledgehammer but so far they do not have the legal ground, as WINE is developed based on public knowledge and Microsoft famously keeps their source code closed.
If you saw the Windows source code, and then you contributed to WINE, it is possible
Microsoft could make the legal argument that WINE was using stolen trade secrets, even if the verbatim source code was added to the WINE codebase.
Whether or not that would have worked for Microsoft is up in the air; but the WINE project didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Can you expand on that a little?
The potential for copyright infringement (or at least the appearance of copyright infringement) would be too high. Better to keep a “clean room” approach in the wine project to avoid attracting Microsoft’s ire.
Ah, that definitely makes sense. Thanks!
WINE is a compatibility layer (famously, WINE Is Not an Emulator) for Windows APIs on posix OSes; most notably this allows you to run Windows applications on Linux.
Microsoft would truly love to beat WINE to death with a legal sledgehammer but so far they do not have the legal ground, as WINE is developed based on public knowledge and Microsoft famously keeps their source code closed.
If you saw the Windows source code, and then you contributed to WINE, it is possible Microsoft could make the legal argument that WINE was using stolen trade secrets, even if the verbatim source code was added to the WINE codebase.
Whether or not that would have worked for Microsoft is up in the air; but the WINE project didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Gotcha. Thank you.