• TCB13@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    You can. Who can prove you read it? There’s copyright infringement that happens when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.

    • Possibly linux
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      11 months ago

      I am not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure your wrong entirely. The court will take one look at the code and then at the MS code and they will see the similarities.

      Under no circumstances can a developer of wine, proton or React os look at leaked code. That would be a major liability.

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Under no circumstances can a developer of wine, proton or React os look at leaked code. That would be a major liability.

        Why? As long as there’s no copied code there’s no copyright infringement. Nobody can ever prove you had a look at some leaked source code.

        What you’re saying is mostly the reason why we still have compatibility issues in Wine.

        Anyways, do you really think that Microsoft is so worried about ethics and hypothetical copyright infringements as you seem to be? if they were they wouldn’t be what they are today… maybe that’s Linux desktop isn’t still a viable option? :)