Hello, I'm a (mostly windows, but with some linux skills) programmer from russia who is interested in helping developing Wine, but due to all the mess I read about the legal issues I want to ask first.
What is Wine's position regarding people who had seen the windows source code? I tried to search for this topic, and, found this: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-Non_002dFree-Code.html
After reading this, it looks like it's ok if someone have seen the windows source code, and provided he is not going to directly copy unmodified source code (what a stupid idea!), nor refer to it, he would be considered as a good/trusted person?
Please clarify this to me.
Regards, Dmitry Morovkov.
I think it is safe to avoid working on parts of wine that are directly involved with the source code you have seen.
You are probably talking about the windows 2000 winsock source code that was leaked a while ago, right? If so I believe it would be safe for you to contribute to other parts of wine.
You should also probably not have any trace of windows source code on your machine while developing for wine, but unless you are a microsoft employee you shouldn't have it anyways.
I am not a lawyer nor do I have any tenure with wine, so I could be wrong.
On 8/16/07, Dmitry Morovkov dmorovkov@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I'm a (mostly windows, but with some linux skills) programmer from russia who is interested in helping developing Wine, but due to all the mess I read about the legal issues I want to ask first.
What is Wine's position regarding people who had seen the windows source code? I tried to search for this topic, and, found this: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-Non_002dFree-Code.html
After reading this, it looks like it's ok if someone have seen the windows source code, and provided he is not going to directly copy unmodified source code (what a stupid idea!), nor refer to it, he would be considered as a good/trusted person?
Please clarify this to me.
Regards, Dmitry Morovkov.
"Dmitry Morovkov" dmorovkov@gmail.com writes:
After reading this, it looks like it's ok if someone have seen the windows source code, and provided he is not going to directly copy unmodified source code (what a stupid idea!), nor refer to it, he would be considered as a good/trusted person?
No, if you have seen parts of the Windows source code, you can't write code for Wine. We can't afford to take any risks in that area.
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Alexandre Julliard -
Dmitry Morovkov -
James Keane