Round-up of the recent WindowsAPI discussions from when I wasn't looking

[Don Clugston]

Sascha Katzner wrote:
> Stewart Gordon wrote:
>> I'm not sure I know what you mean.  Are you basically talking about 
>> extracting the structure definitions and function prototypes from the
>>  headers, and then putting them into new headers created from scratch?
> 
> Yes.
>> Where does hand-tweaking someone else's headers fall into your 
>> argument? This is the approach I'm using.  I think there are also a 
>> few people running the headers through an automated tool and then 
>> hand-tweaking the output.
> 
> I think it depends on the source of the headers and how far you define 
> hand-tweaking. If you use an automated tool you shouldn't use the 
> original m$ headers in any case, because this could violate the 
> intellectual property of m$. It's safer in this case to use the public 
> domain MinGW headers.
> 
> On the other hand if someone would (pure hypothetical) use an automated 
> tool on original m$ headers and hand-tweak the result (delete the 
> comments and reformat it, perhaps also rename parameter names), no one 
> could distinguish the result from a pure rewrite from scratch via hand. 
> ...I think this would be in a gray zone.
> 
>>> Because this was the way, the MinGW Team created their header files, 
>>> I realy see no reason that we couldn't go that way.
>>
>> What is your source for this statement?
> 
> I really see no other way they could have created their files, if
> reverse engineering is off-limits.

No. They read descriptions of the functions, and used that to work out what must 
be in the headers. They did not look at the headers.
Sometimes, the documentation they used was wrong, and so there are functions 
which are in different MinGW headers compared to where they are in the MS headers.

If you have looked at the headers, the new ones could be a derivative work.

MinGW's legal position would be much stronger if they had documented their 
sources. In fact, in general, the quality of the MinGW headers is vastly 
inferior to what Stewart's done with them. Thanks, Stewart.

BTW - about vfw.h, I could be wrong. I just read something about it in the 
Platform API docs. It seems most likely that not all uses of vfw are deprecated.

- Don.