On Friday, 16 October 2015 at 01:11:01 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
I'd really like to see a trace of the history of those headers to make sure they're _really_ in the public domain. I have doubts that microsoft ever declared that in headers they released and that someone else just copied (or transcribed) the apis and declared them to be in the public domain.
Yeah, I've always wondered how mingw had a version of the Windows headers in the public domain (which is where our bindings are derived from IIRC0. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they had been copied from MS' official headers at some point, in which case they wouldn't be legit, but at the same time, I'm not sure that I want to figure out that they're not legit, because we're kind of screwed if they're not. That being said, I really doubt that Microsoft cares all that much if all you're doing is trying to bind to their public API to use it, since they want you to use it. AFAIK, they've never even done anything against the WINE guys, and they're actually reimplementing the API in order to get away from MS (though I don't know where they got whatever headers they use).
- Jonathan M Davis
