On Sun Apr 27 16:01:27 2025 +0000, Jinoh Kang wrote:
By the way, personally I think mismatches for unused code path is a good idea as long as it makes the code simpler. We can try to implement every trivial edge case, but then they collectively increase maintenance burden and risks making them too close to some copyrighted commercial Win32 implementation from Redmond for no good reason that Wine could argue in court, IMHO.
Here's an example:
We implement a bunch of Native APIs (Nt*). Wait, aren't they internal APIs? Aren't they copyrightable? No? Because a lot of applications decided to rely directly on those internal APIs and made it technically and physically impossible to fairly compete with other Win32 implementation without adding those internals? The antitrust laws agree, right?
Well how about, like, win32k and wow64? Do we have known apps that rely on them? Or maybe merely copying the export names (but not the parameter types and such) are considered fair use? Maybe not, but covered by another clause? Act? In other legislations? Are those questions even valid? Is it even profitable to test these in the court? Are we lawyers?