Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a 
>> free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with 
>> Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this 
>> _should_ be 100% illegal.)
> 
>   Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
> would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.
> It's not much different from making an emulator, and those aren't illegal.
> 
>   It would be illegal for them to lift binaries (eg. system libraries) from
> Windows XP and distributing them alongside their own OS, but it's perfectly
> legal for them to build their own versions of those binaries.

I was under the impression that things like (for example) the API for 
DirectX is patented, and therefore you can't write a library that has 
the same API (i.e., the same functions with the same names and 
signatures that do the same thing).

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