http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6836
Summary: Confusing Windows About Boxes Product: Wine Version: unspecified Platform: Other OS/Version: other Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: wine-binary AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org ReportedBy: matthew.flaschen@gatech.edu
I realized (in the course of researching Bug 6834), that Wine shows its contributors in the about of certain programs that comes with Windows, such as Pinball, the original notepad, pinball, minesweeper, etc. All of these programs (and all the Windows operating system programs I tested) show a Wine credit (scroll bar with Wine contributors) in the about box; this may also be true of other programs using the same about box type. I will attach the about boxes from these three programs on Windows and Wine. In at least one case (original Notepad), there is no indication of the original copyright/authorship at all, and a careless read makes it seem like Wine wrote it! For Minesweeper, the authorship is included, but there is no copyright statement. For Pinball, there's a cutoff statement "3D Pinball Table created for Microsoft by [...]" (if you can't wait to see the attachments, it's Maxis). I really don't know for certain how this came about (and am not prepared to read the source right now), but I'll speculate. There's probably an API call that generates about screens. It seems the Wine version always shows the line after the copyright statement from the original (at least until it gets cutoff); this could be a parameter for the function. Regardless, I don't think this is fair. The Microsoft copyright statement should be generated in good faith. The original about boxes contain the full name of the program, the version, a generic Copyright (C) 1981-2001 (at least on those I tested) Microsoft Corporation. Then, some have more detailed authorship on the next line, such as "by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson". This is the only part that Wine interprets. After that, the Windows versions go on to say "This product is licensed under ... to <NAME>", and for no apparent reason the physical memory available. I'm guessing that this info is passed to an API call, but if not mostly equivalent info is present in the resource file (under Version-1) and could be manually parsed.
In short, I think Wine should attempt to reproduce this info and should not take advantage of the API for free advertising. I definitely appreciate the very hard work of the wine developers, but I think the project is out of line here. At the very least, the original authorship and copyright should be displayed (ensuring that nothing's cut off). However, I don't think the contributors should be shown here. It makes it appear to the naive user that they helped write the program; in fact, they wrote a translation layer the program is currently (but was not designed to be) using (some of these people didn't even write any calls the program uses).
There may be legal ramifications to this, if wine is viewed as creating a derivative work (doubtful); strict good-faith translation would be fair use, but this might not be. Either way, I don't think it's right.