On 6/24/2010 4:28 AM, Invisible wrote:
> 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).
Actually.. No. An API is an "interface". The underlying way that it goes 
from, "I gave it this data", to, "It gave me this result", is what is 
patented, not the API itself. Otherwise emulating **anything**, 
including the BIOS, which you need to do things like DOSBox, would be 
illegal too.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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