Windows API and druntime/Phobos

[Marco Leise]

Am 28.01.2012, 11:22 Uhr, schrieb Kagamin <spam at here.lot>:

> I also remember MinGW folks were asked about this, but they don't know,  
> where the headers came from.

I understand that Microsoft prefers Visual Studio to be used with one of  
their compilers, but you can't honestly sue anyone nowadays for copying  
headers to interface with the OS. It is Windows, the most used OS on  
consumer PCs. Who's gain was it if a major part of open source software  
was locked out because they couldn't port the application due to missing  
OS headers. If you always looked only on the legal side of things, you  
would be allowed and disallowed absurd things:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/nov/07/uk.queensspeech20072
The other ingredient is common sense. - So you don't buy Visual Studio,  
which may be a loss for MS, if those OSS developers would have switched to  
Windows, bought VS etc... in the other case, Windows loses popularity as a  
platform, because a lot of software wont be ported. With the background of  
the legal debate about making IE4 a part of the operating system I'd  
assume that some degree of freedom and choice of software is today  
considered almost as valuable as a formal copyright in a header file.
It would be different if WINE somehow got the Windows source code and was  
only through this event becoming an alternative that made Windows  
obsolete. But I think we had the header/interface discussion here already  
:)