Greetings,
As part of my work to create the ultimate works-out-of-the-box Wine package, I've begun to ponder the idea of including the Mozilla ActiveX control inside the Wine package. Currently, to install applications that use Internet Explorer internally, such as Steam, the user has to download the Mozilla ActiveX control as a tar file and then manually register the DLL to get Wine to use it (see the Howto in the AppDB entry here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=1554 )
Modifying Wine to recognize when the Mozilla ActiveX Control is installed without having to register it manually should be easy enough, however distributing it with the Wine package or as a separate side package presents an unusual licensing issue.
Now, the Mozilla ActiveX control is freely licensed, and we can redistribute it however we please. Unfortunately, to make it work in Wine we also need to use the dlls for the Microsoft Foundation Classes that it's written in such as msvcp70.dll, as Wine does not currently implement those.
These files have an unusual license. Someone who owns the compiler (such as MSVC 7) is allowed to distribute them, however redistribution further from there isn't necessarily allowed, as the person receiving the file doesn't have a license to redistribute like the EULA for the compiler grants. This doesn't seem to prevent us from giving out the package with the DLL included, however users wouldn't be able to redistribute it.
This sounds much like the way the situation is with the NVidia drivers. Would building the package be the right way to go here, with the ultimate destination being the restricted copyright repository in Ubuntu? Or is there something I'm overlooking here (perhaps reading the license wrong)?
Thanks, Scott Ritchie