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Winelib Hobbled by Exception-Handling Patent

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the cheese-with-your-wine dept.

davidwr writes "UKBuilder.com reports that Borland's structured exception handling (SEH) patent affects Winelib. Winelib allows you to compile Windows-targeted code to run natively on Linux. Because of the patent, gcc does not include support for SEH, which is widely used in the MS-Windows world. There are workarounds, but you won't like them."

11 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Who Next? by geomon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sure that Wine was looking for a Microsoft-based patent attack, but this one probably caught many off guard.

    Who else may have submarine patents might affect the development of Wine?

    --
    "Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
    1. Re:Who Next? by Curtman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Makes you wonder if Eben Moglen did anybody a favour in bringing people's attention to Wine's potential patent problems. With patents its best not to even look for them. This just gives Borland ideas I'm sure. They don't have any products to sell these days do they? Why not expand into the litigation market.

      Its great that there are lawyers willing to spend time on OSS projects, but they just dumped a whole pile of hurt on Wine if Borland pursues this.

  2. Donation please... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is where Borland needs to step in by giving the patent (or providing a legal exception) to the OSS community.

  3. no, it's legally interesting by cahiha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Winelib is covered by the LGPL. If Borland has shipped Winelib in Kylix, they may already have given people a license to use the code. Perhaps they can wiggle out of that, but they can't continue to ship Winelib if they claim a patent on something in it.

  4. Re:Wait a minute... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    gcc also doesn't support register allocation with interference graphs just because of a patent.

  5. Of course by einhverfr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am sure that Borland might appreciate the opportunity to strike back at Microsoft in a substantial way.

    --

    LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
  6. Re:What patent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since the patent postdates Windows NT 3.1, and even references the NT SEH implementation, it must be possible to implement NT-compatible SEH without infringing the patent.

  7. There's an uber-workaround by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The uber-workaround for software patents is to have the code copyrighted and "owned" in Europe. Europe (as of now) has no software patents. The code can be developed anywhere, but the copyright must be transfered to some European entity and it must be distributed from Europe.

    Remember, patents don't mean you can't code it. You can code it. You can use it for personal non-commercial use. You can distribute the code. But you can't use it commercially, distribute binaries, or sell it.

    So the coders can continue doing their merry work, producing code that would violate patents were it compiled and distributed, and the distributors can continue merrily distributing the code in Europe.

    The only people who are left out of this are Americans who would have to buy licenses from Borland to use the code in the US. That's fine; Americans should either pay according to their laws or change their laws.

    But we shouldn't let American laws affect the rest of the world where they don't apply.

    We need to start doing this for all open source software. There is no way to avoid trampling on patents if you're writing any fairly large or complex piece of software these days, especially any software that involves codecs, pre-existing APIs, and pre-existing file formats. Well, just about any useful piece of large software involves such things. Rather than getting into a hissy-fit on Slashdot every time some patent issue is discovered, open source developers should just plan for the problem and plan to bypass it.

    The patent situation is not like the copyright situation. Copyright laws are roughly similar everywhere in the world and they are enforcable everywhere in the world. There are wide divergences in patent law around the world and most of the world is not burdened by America's folly in this regard. Why should developers bear the burden of one country's legal folly? Answer: developers shouldn't, and should simply pick the right jurisdiction for hosting the project.

    This isn't some radical idea here. MPlayer, for example, could not possibly exist as a US-based project. US coders can and do contribute to it, but it's based in Hungary, where it's safe.

  8. OS/2, Prior Art by NullProg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From Microsoft,

    In digging through obscure .H and .INC files to piece together what constitutes Win32 SEH, one of the best sources of information turned out to be the IBM OS/2 header files (particularly BSEXCPT.H). This shouldn't be too surprising if you've been in this business for a while. The SEH mechanisms described here were defined back when Microsoft was still working on OS/2. For this reason, you'll find SEH under Win32 and OS/2 to be remarkably similar.

    Article here:
    A Crash Course on the Depths of Win32(TM) Structured Exception Handling;

    Enjoy,

    --
    It's just the normal noises in here.
  9. Isn't that the point? by hanshotfirst · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The point of patents (and copyrights) is to guarantee financial gain for the inventor of a product for a certain period of time before the design or material is released to the public domain.

    Now, discussions whether that should apply to physical inventions only or software is a topic I'm not getting into here.

    I'm not going to touch how long those patents or copyrights should be - that war rages in enough other threads.

    The financial gain for the inventor/creator is part of the motivation for inventing/creating. As much as I dislike MS, they are entitled to the rights afforded by their patents. Like it or not software is patentable around here, so we are stuck with the consequences.

    -2, unpopular concept

    --
    Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
  10. Only for porting windows apps to linux .... by scharkalvin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since this problem only affects porting existing windows code to Linux, it could be solved by
    using the MS tools and linking the app with winlib.
    Before you flame this, consider who would be doing this....someone who has a closed source application already working on Windows and wants to sell his application to the Linux market. IIRC, winlib is licensed under the LGPL, so this approach would be legal. (and this is EXACTLY how Coral ported Wordperfect 2000 from windows to Linux).