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.
Am Freitag, 4. Januar 2008 17:00:46 schrieb tony.wasserka@freenet.de:
Oh well, I didn't think about that, sorry. Then it of course is a good thing if we implement our own d3dx.
The directx license as far as I understand it, allows installing and using the dx runtime, which d3dx* is a part of, on Wine, even if the user does not have a Windows license. However, it does not allow shipping the DLLs with any application that it intended to run on non-windows platforms. So we need the d3dx DLLs if anyone wants to port an app that uses them using Wine.
Appart of that, there's a usability argument. Since Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista ship many of those DLLs, apps forget to ship them. Even if apps ship the dx runtime, there are some tricks needed to install it. Just having the DLLs available helps the usability of Wine.
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)
just fyi, at least the .dds file format is well documented. I don't know about .x, but I think it is just plain text as well. Applications like kuickshow(the kde image viewer) have an implementation for it, and I think Gimp supports it as well. DXTn makes problems, especially writing DXTn images, but we can maybe use the Nvidia texture tools(MIT license) to solve both technical and legal problems.
Since everybody agrees that we need a built-in d3dx9, we could begin to implement it. In the last talk about it, no plan was found to implement it: does one create a wined3dx or implement on the top of the last d3dx9 dll?
So, I think that a definitive answer should be given very quickly.
David
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