Chambers wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Orchid XP v8 [mailto:voi### [at] devnull]
>> Besides, I was under the distinct impression that it's *illegal* to
>> reverse-engineer Windows. And that its implementation is covered by
>> several billion patents precisely to prevent anybody ever making
>> something compatible with it, for that matter.
> 
> WINE Is Not an Emulator.  They don't really reverse engineer anything
> (that is, they don't reimplement the Windows core DLLs or anything),
> rather they allow Windows .exe's to run on Linux, and allow dynamic
> linking of Windows DLLs under Linux.

That's not correct. DirectX DLLs have no chance in hell of running in Linux,
for example, since they probably talk to some Windows-specific thing to
talk to the graphics cards. WINE has a full implementation of DirectX that
calls OpenGL functions instead of... whatever Windows DLLs do.

 "If a library tries to access features of the rest of the system that are
not fully implemented in Wine, the native DLL might work much worse than
the corresponding built-in one, if at all. For example, the native Windows
GDI library must be paired with a Windows display driver, which of course
is not present under Intel Unix and Wine. 

 Finally, occasionally built-in Wine DLLs implement more features than the
corresponding native Windows DLLs. Probably the most important example of
such behavior is the integration of Wine with X provided by Wine's built-in
USER DLL. Should the native Windows USER library take load-order
precedence, such features as the ability to use the clipboard or
drag-and-drop between Wine windows and X windows will be lost."

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