On Sunday 04 February 2007 00:07, Anant Narayanan wrote:
Would this mean that I am not allowed to write a library that emulates the winsock api? My question is this: Certainly I am not allowed to reverse-engineer the M$ networking stack, but am I also not allowed to replicate the interface?
You certainly can; and closed-box reverse-engineering can hold in a court of law too. The ReactOS and Wine projects are already doing it.
Wine is not reverse engineering afaik.
And, the part of .NET that Mono implements is a published _open_ standard. Nobody's going to sue anybody.
What exactly do you mean by "open". The standards are encumbered by patents. And the Microvell deal is aimed at non paying users of M$ patents. Does Mono violate M$ patents?. To be sure u would have to higher a lawyer and do a patent search. And according to Miguel De Icaza he does not know of any possible violations. But of late he does not seem to know a lot more. Recently he tried justifying the OOXML ECMA standards. His argument was that there was nothing wrong with yet another standard. Which completely missed the point that OOXML was not a standard but an incorrect and incomplete description of a single implemetation of MSoffice blobs. A standard is one when it has more than one independent implementation for starters.