I don’t have a list. Just considering that MS patents EVERYTHING I have a tough time believing they don’t have patents over at least SOME DirectX things that Wine has created an implementation for, etc.
WINE doesn’t need to implement anything that DirectX does, it just needs to translate those calls into the equivalent Linux ones. Linux does all the actual work; and if Microsoft had a patent for “drawing pixels on a screen” they’d have shown that hand by now.
Sure, but patents cover methods and implementations. If Wine gets a cleanroom spec that says “when you put in these values, we need these pixels out” then they are free to write their own implementation not covered by the patent.
What patents?
I don’t have a list. Just considering that MS patents EVERYTHING I have a tough time believing they don’t have patents over at least SOME DirectX things that Wine has created an implementation for, etc.
WINE doesn’t need to implement anything that DirectX does, it just needs to translate those calls into the equivalent Linux ones. Linux does all the actual work; and if Microsoft had a patent for “drawing pixels on a screen” they’d have shown that hand by now.
Sure, but patents cover methods and implementations. If Wine gets a cleanroom spec that says “when you put in these values, we need these pixels out” then they are free to write their own implementation not covered by the patent.