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Wine Now Has Big-Time Lawyers On Its Side
Roblimo writes "For years there's been fear that the Wine Project would get sued by Microsoft at some point, and this fear has kept IBM and other major free software-using companies from participating openly in it. Now the Software Freedom Law Center, headed by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, is offering free legal services to Wine (and other FOSS projects) to allay corporate fears and head off potential lawsuits."
"well, we might not get all of their business, but we'll take what we can get." From a business standpoint, that would seem to make more sense.
What makes sense about supporting a project whose focus will make one of your core (profitable) products unnecessary?
Making Windows applications run on Linux (or whatever) won't make Linux users run out and buy Office. No, rather it will make Windows customers migrate to Linux (because they can still keep their old software).
Does anyone seriously think IBM are overly concerned about being sued by Microsoft if they contributed to wine. The most likely reason they dont is because its just not interesting form them, just like its not interesting for most companies.
Would someone like to post list of FOSS projects that have been killed due to litigation, or even threat of litigation. I assume this list must be quite lengthy given the amount slashdotters bang on about it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
No, reverse engineering for compatibility is defined as legal by the DMCA. There's an exception for it, for exactly the examples you've cited (document formats). As long as there's no copyright violation involved, I'd say they're on pretty firm ground, legally.
-twb
Well we are talking about Eben Moglen after all, he has been donating his time to the Free Software Foundation for years. It's not that big of a surprise.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
No.
The nasty provisions of the DMCA are there to prevent people from disabling copy protection and from falsely creating or removing "copyright management information", which means things like holograms on the outside of packages as well as simple copyright notices in code.
Copyright only covers the particular expression of a concept. APIs have been held to be concepts, and you can't copyright them. You can copyright
To protect an idea or concept, you have to use a patent. You can't patent an API, and even if you could it's not protected by the nasty provisions of the DMCA. I'm pretty sure any patents on document formats will be thrown out, too.
Regarding reverse engineering: don't sweat it. As long as you are only looking at what a program does, it makes no legal difference whether you are looking at what bits it sends on a wire or what output it makes on a screen. It's only if you disassemble the program and use the disassembled instructions as your own that you are guilty of copyright infringement.
No, I'm not a lawyer, but I do play one on the net.
sigs, as if you care.
He is the lawyer who helped to write the GPL that nobody (even SCO) will test in court and made it so airtight legally. He's been doing things like this for the FSF for years. He's also working on the GPL3, and I think this represents him making the kinds of services he's been providing to the FSF available for all of FOSS. I don't think there's anything nefarious or strange going on here.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
First, this will mean that more programs will get support. (Applications like AutoCAD, which doesn't quite work yet.)
Second, since I started using the Mac, I've become interested in the Darwine project, which aims to make Windows programs run on the Mac without running Windows in an emulator; this project aims to combine Qemu and Wine to run the Wine code natively on the Mac iron while emulating only the application code. Big support behind Wine will likely mean a better Windows-like operating layer not only on x86 systems running, say, Linux, but also on non-x86 systems that are candidates for running the occasional Windows program.
Third, IBM has OS/2 code, which contains some of the same code as Windows itself. I'm not saying that IBM could submit that code directly into Wine, but IBM could have a clean-room implementation of some of the most important functions, using a plain-English specification written by programmers with access to the code. Not to mention that it means a lot of Wine bugs will get fixed. This is good news!
Isn't Mono sponsered/supported by Novell?
p r04045.html
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2004/06/
You can have your god back when you are old enough to handle the responsibility.
Well, Windows Lite (whatever) is Windows with slightly different userland apps, and somewhat castrated by licensing - not by technology. The incremental cost to product 'Lite is basiclly 0 to MS. Getting Wine to a level that Microsoft could call "comptabale" with Windows is a huge undertaking. Ya, it can do a lot. And ya, other people are selling it as "compatable", and ya, MS is not at the top of the list when you think of "compatability", even within their own products. But they sure cant call Wine compatable today, and wont be able to without a massive amount of work. And even if they could, such a step is compleatly contrary to their entire practice of tying products together. If anything, MS would be more likely to drop the cost of Windows to $0 to protect their apps, rather then trying to port their apps (with Wine(lib)) to alternate $0 OSs. While Windows may never get to $0, the existance of "Lite" is an indication that MS is, to some degree, moving in this direction.
As for Novell supporting their products on other OSs "now", you have a unusual definition of "now". NDS runs on about as many diverse OS/hardware systems as any commercial products, and and ran on at least Windows almost since the begining (10 years ago). Groupwise has always been cross platform - its native system not being Netware, ever. The server bits of ZenWorks, also multi platform for a fairly long time. And no, they are not migratign Netware to a Linux base, they are (have, actually, its done) migrating all Netware services to both/either a Netware or Linux base. There is a subtle but significant difference there.
It's only if you disassemble the program and use the disassembled instructions as your own that you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Further, if you disassemble the program and read the disassembly to understand what it does, then write your own program that does the same thing, you are not guilty of copyright infringement.
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