On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 19:40 -0500, Misha Koshelev wrote:
On 9/4/07, Alexander Sornes wrote:
Tirsdag 04 september 2007 03:17, skrev Misha Koshelev:
On 9/3/07, Stefan Dosinger wrote:
Am Montag, 3. September 2007 13:30:57 schrieb Damjan Jovanovic:
Somebody needs to make a do-nothing-useful app, intended for Windows, that also installs on wine and supplies each and every DLL that Windows applications need but we don't have in wine (like MFC42.DLL, the D3DX9_xx.DLL's, new MSVCRT's, etc.). That way we can legally use those DLLs without a Windows licence.
This is not necessarily true. I don't know about MFC42.dll or the msvcrts, but the directx eula does not allow that; It requires the application to run only on the Microsoft Windows operating system, targetting both Windows and Linux+Wine violates the contract. These are the conditions for distributing the directx dlls. I've not found anything against installing them on Wine, you just must not distribute the DLLs with an app that targets both Windows and Wine. Thus I think it's legal to write a script that downloads them from the original location @microsoft.com and installs them, as long as that script isn't bundled with the dlls. However, IANAL.
What remains unanswered though is how this affects game vendors whose games run on Wine without intention from the game vendor and ship the dlls, e.g. Eve Online.
Actually you all bring up rather interesting points with regards to Vector NTI as:
(a) It pretty much ships with almost every Microsoft redistributable needed (e.g., MDAC, Windows Script, MFC71, etc.) and installs them on its installation _except_ MFC42 (not sure why this oversight and if this would break it on some native system, although I _believe_ it installed correctly on my plain vanilla Win98 VMWare installation, but I would have to double check for sure).
I believe mfc42 is bundled with Windows XP.
Actually, I just reinstalled Windows 98 in VMWare _without_ installing VMWare tools and even my version of Windows 98 is bundled with mfc42.dll, so wine really should provide it too...
Oh yeah and before this starts a discussion about legalities I meant we should provide our own version, not Microsoft's.
(b) If the licenses for those DLLs/redistributables are the same as you suggest for DirectX, this would mean they couldn't ever say they support Wine (but I'm not sure whether or not the licenses are). Anyway, seeing it work "gold" on Wine still wouldn't be a bad thing in either case and certainly Vector NTI is not the only program that needs good winhelp support.
Misha
Misha