The installer program contains a few things that may or may not be redistributable - for instance, it contains MSVCRT40.DLL and MFC40.DLL, both of which are available for free from dll-files.com so it seemed to make sense to include them.
You can't redistribute them, unless you have some sort of special license from m$. There is a simple trick to get round this. You can usually find m$ dlls like mfc, msvcrt and so on in microsoft trial game installers. So, to do this legally, you would have to ask the if he wants to accept the license conditions of the trial game that contains the needed dll, then download the demo from the net (You can even point to download.microsoft.com), extract and install the dll (Installing the game may be necessary if you can't get the dlls out of the installer), and then do whatever else the script does. I suppose it would be a good thing to warn the user that he must have a windows license to use IE4,5 or 6.
Do people think this should be linked to from WineHQ?
Not as it is now, M$ could sue for copyright violation, it wouldn't be a nice experience.
Ivan.
On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 19:48, Ivan Leo Murray-Smith wrote:
You can't redistribute them, unless you have some sort of special license from m$. There is a simple trick to get round this.
Why do you say that? I'd like to see the legal text that says they are not redistributable, as they are intended to be shipped alongside applications and can be freely downloaded from the net (ie the situation is no different to the current one).
I suppose it would be a good thing to warn the user that he must have a windows license to use IE4,5 or 6.
Yes, I intend to put a notice to that effect in a future version.
Do people think this should be linked to from WineHQ?
Not as it is now, M$ could sue for copyright violation, it wouldn't be a nice experience.
Maybe, but they'd have to sue me. Given that there are people running websites that ship practically every DLL on a windows system, that would not make much sense. They'd also have a hard time arguing that the MSVC Runtime is not meant to be redistributed when many apps do so.
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Ivan Leo Murray-Smith -
Mike Hearn