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.
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.