I do not think patents which are blocking your ability to use the DLLs in Wine. It is your Windows license.
I believe that if you have a Windows license for your machine, you are free to use Windows or its DLLs. This includes all the "free" downloads from their web-pages. I think, if you do not have a license for that machine, you are in violation of the license, which is illegal. I am not sure i got all the details right but you can probably find more on their web-page. If i understand it correctly, it of course means that there are no really free downloads on their web-page, as they all rely on a purchase of Windows. This makes the "free" download kind of expensive. For Wine it means that anything the user has to D/L from their homepage is a no-no. /p On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 13:46 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi, > I enjoyed the current wine development of the D3DX libraries and also tried > to implement an interface. > However, while testing it I noticed that Wine seems to fully support > everything when it has a native > d3dx9.dll (though it even was able to run one of my games without any > dll...). So I was asking myself > if there's even a reason to implement anything other than the inlined > functions of D3DX, when we only > lose performance and development time with it. Also, what would we do at > functions like > D3DXCreateTextureFromFile which supports 9 file formats? Would we implement > e.g. a BMP file > loader ourselves or would we use a 3rd party library for that? Are there any > patents regarding the > DX specific file formats (.x/.dds)? Don't misunderstand me, I'd also like to > help out at D3DX, but I > really think we'd be better off by removing everything of D3DX but the > inlined stuff. > Best regards, > Tony Wasserka > > > (PS: if one argues that we need the implementation for WineLib, I _think_ > it'd be enough to just > stub all functions so that the program compiles fine and then use the native > dll again) > > > > > > > > > > > > >
