Am 28.01.2012, 11:22 Uhr, schrieb Kagamin <s...@here.lot>:
I also remember MinGW folks were asked about this, but they don't know,
where the headers came from.
I understand that Microsoft prefers Visual Studio to be used with one of
their compilers, but you can't honestly sue anyone nowadays for copying
headers to interface with the OS. It is Windows, the most used OS on
consumer PCs. Who's gain was it if a major part of open source software
was locked out because they couldn't port the application due to missing
OS headers. If you always looked only on the legal side of things, you
would be allowed and disallowed absurd things:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/nov/07/uk.queensspeech20072
The other ingredient is common sense. - So you don't buy Visual Studio,
which may be a loss for MS, if those OSS developers would have switched to
Windows, bought VS etc... in the other case, Windows loses popularity as a
platform, because a lot of software wont be ported. With the background of
the legal debate about making IE4 a part of the operating system I'd
assume that some degree of freedom and choice of software is today
considered almost as valuable as a formal copyright in a header file.
It would be different if WINE somehow got the Windows source code and was
only through this event becoming an alternative that made Windows
obsolete. But I think we had the header/interface discussion here already
:)
