On 11/21/05, Michael Jung mjung@iss.tu-darmstadt.de wrote:
I think it's kind of ironic that the finding of facts states that it's not possible for technical or economical reasons to clone the Windows API, a statment which in my opinion Wine clearly proves wrong, while not mentioning the legal barriers.
I think from an economical perspective a project like wine is only possible because it's open source, and there are always developers coming out of the woodwork to send in a patch or offer a hand. If people using wine didn't have access to the source they wouldn't be able to do their own investigations into why a certain piece of software isn't working, and this would leave it up to the developers (who may not have access to the software) to do their own testing. Also I think people don't mind running alpha or beta software if it's free, but a company trying to sell it would have trouble getting enough customers to fund itself.
Just my two cents...
n0dalus.