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.
/p
On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 13:46 +0100, tony.wasserka@freenet.de wrote:
Hi, I enjoyed the current wine development of the D3DX libraries and also tried to implement an interface. However, while testing it I noticed that Wine seems to fully support everything when it has a native d3dx9.dll (though it even was able to run one of my games without any dll...). So I was asking myself if there's even a reason to implement anything other than the inlined functions of D3DX, when we only lose performance and development time with it. Also, what would we do at functions like D3DXCreateTextureFromFile which supports 9 file formats? Would we implement e.g. a BMP file loader ourselves or would we use a 3rd party library for that? Are there any patents regarding the DX specific file formats (.x/.dds)? Don't misunderstand me, I'd also like to help out at D3DX, but I really think we'd be better off by removing everything of D3DX but the inlined stuff. Best regards, Tony Wasserka
(PS: if one argues that we need the implementation for WineLib, I _think_ it'd be enough to just stub all functions so that the program compiles fine and then use the native dll again)