Now that i think of it, Marcus's point about redistribution is even more relevant than the problem with licensing.
If one was was allowed (legally) to copy DLLs from Windows without a license, i could do it..... because i know how.... could my mother?.... no way!
The only people that i have any success in convincing to switch to Linux/Wine were in situations where it worked "out of the box".
Having to download tons of redistributeables and DLLs from the web is not a good solution for "non technical users". Even on real Windows this is a problem.
I cannot count the many times family & friends have called me saying: "Help! it says... Unable to find blabla.dll or blabla not installed" (using 2K/XP/Vista). Lets not copy this scenario. I want them to stop calling :-).
/p
On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 17:00 +0100, tony.wasserka@freenet.de wrote:
I do not think patents which are blocking your ability to use the DLLs in Wine. It is your Windows license.
I believe that if you have a Windows license for your machine, you are free to use Windows or its DLLs. This includes all the "free" downloads from their web-pages. I think, if you do not have a license for that machine, you are in violation of the license, which is illegal.
I am not sure i got all the details right but you can probably find more on their web-page.
If i understand it correctly, it of course means that there are no really free downloads on their web-page, as they all rely on a purchase of Windows. This makes the "free" download kind of expensive.
For Wine it means that anything the user has to D/L from their homepage is a no-no.
Oh well, I didn't think about that, sorry. Then it of course is a good thing if we implement our own d3dx.