Re: wintab.dll: Copyright & trademark issues.

[Robert North]

Patrik Stridvall ps-at-leissner.se |Wine Mailing Lists| wrote:

As I mentioned in an e-mail a couple of days back,
I'm about to start implemening a version of wintab.dll.
First I want to ask about legal issues:

1. trademark issues.

wintab is a trademark.
Does this impact on the ability to implement wintab.dll

No, I can't see how.

Everything we will reasonable do with the name are either unrelated to
trademarks or are used in reference to what is protected by the
trademark.

Which is what I assumed.
Of couse I wanted to move beyond assumption.

2. API header files.
Please look at the licence for the API files, avaialable at the following URL:
http://www.pointing.com/Wintab/WTKIT126.ZIP
Does this allow our use of the headers, in Wine?
Does it allow the use of fragments of the headers in Wine?

From the headers:

< The text and information contained in this file may be freely used,
< copied, or distributed without compensation or licensing restrictions.

So the headers are basicly public domain. Specifically it is compatible
with the X11 license and the LGPL so no problem. We could include the
files as they are without any modification at all as far as copyright
is concerned. Presumably we might need some compiler related fixes though.

This is not too much of an issue, as I understand it's OK to re-write
compatible headers "In your own words".

True.

3. I am in the UK, how does this affect the copyright/trademark issues
above?

It is not likely to matter very much almost regardless of there you are
in the world, copyright and trademark laws are usually not that different.
UK is pretty normal AFAIK.

Ok, some background about wintab:
wintab.dll is an "open industry standard" API
developed by a group of tablet manufacturers, and seems to
be currently maintained by the company LCS/Telegraphics.
Web page for wintab: http://www.pointing.com/WINTAB.HTM
LCS/Telegraphics home: http://www.pointing.com/LCS.HTM

OK. Seem to contain documentation and other things nessary
or useful for implementing.

I can see two issues though.
1. It is not an offical Microsoft DLL so should it be part of Wine or not?
  IMHO yes, it seems to be widely used. However Alexandre decides.

Interesting point.
I'd like it to be part of wine.

2. How do you expect to implement this presumably very complicted DLL?
  Does Linux have some special libraries for supporting tablets?

I was going to discuss this in some more technical e-mails, but I'll
give a quick run down of the issues as I see them this minute.

Initially I'll only attempt to implement enough of wintab to get it working on Painter5, and Photoshop6.
To this end I'll intially only implement the features these apps require.

In X11, tablets are handled by the XInput X extension.
The quesiton is how to get XInput messages into the wintab format, and wintab-style of
data acquisition.

After that there's the question of how the dll provides the messages to it's clients.

The dll also provides a lot of detail about the capabilities of a tablet.
This must be at mininmum mocked up.
It will eventually need some config files/registry data to map X11 info to wintab.

Then there's the wintab contexts, which describe the areas of screen an app is interested in receiving messages for.
These are quite compex, but I think a few assumptions may allow them to work for simple applications.

The key thing is not to implement everything, and to identify subsets of the wintab features that will provide some or all of the features
required by the target applications.


I'll go into some more detail about the above soon.
If there's anything in particular in the above that you want my thoughts on, please say.
Many thanks
-Rob.