Quite the opposite. WINE developers will have to go an extra mile to avoid getting anywhere even remotely close to the proprietary source code, otherwise they may get sued for copyright infringement -- even if they didn't intentionally copied any of the code.
> 1. How would Microsoft prove that they saw the code?
Get the court to order discovery on all of your computers. They could probably also get subpoenas for the source code hosting sites to reveal relevant access logs. Or someone could admit to reading the source code someplace public, like a bug tracker. Or they could argue that the choice of variable names and minor details of algorithm details are too close to be coincidence. A jury convicted Google because of rangeCheck, after all.
> 2. If microsoft sued wine devs it would be horrible for Microsofts public image. They won't do it.
No it wouldn't, particularly not if they had a strong case (e.g., someone bragging about it). If you think MS looks bad for suing people for stealing the code, then you'd have to think the FSF looks bad for suing people for violating the GPL and stealing the code of, say, Linux.
> 3. I hope the WINE devs don't listen to you.
I hope they don't listen to you. The repercussions are quite large--it's not unimaginable that shutting down the WINE project could result from a lost case. These cases do happen, and defendants do lose (Oracle v. Google is a notable recent one, and that's based on IMHO fairly weak evidence). There's a reason that projects that do major reverse engineering for interoperability have rather elaborate procedures for doing so.
And I'm one of them. We don't want to alienate the already small number of people who develop Free Software. I would rather see companies who violate the GPL comply rather than seek damages. Actually bringing a suit, in my mind, is basically the nuclear option.
When I was involved with Mono we avoided reflecting .NET for much the same reason as elaborated by the poster who you (pretty jerkishly) dismiss. It's very easy to say that other people should undertake extreme personal risk.
It looks like mainly kernel and drivers were leaked. WINE is emulating the Win32, which is distinct from the Windows NT kernel & drivers - kind of like how the Linux API is distinct from the Windows NT kernel, despite Windows supporting it.
This might be a boon for the ReactOS folks, who are trying to implement the NT kernel, except for seeing the Windows source code automatically disqualifies you from being a contributor.
Exactly. A few years ago the ReactOS developers had to stop all development for several months to perform a source code audit. This was meant to deflect accusations that they had derived code from disassembled Windows binaries.
If anything, this could make their legal situation more sticky.
That's unfortunate and doesn't fit my understanding of the situation - is disassembling a binary not fair game, in the same way that Samsung buying an iPhone and cracking it open is? (Assuming we're worried about copyright and not patents).
I vaguely remember that either the Wine or the ReactOS developers rewrote parts of their source a while after Win2k source leak in 2004, because there were some contributors who had been exposed to Microsoft's source code, and a rewrite of the parts those devs had touched was apparently the only way to make sure they were "clean".
IIRC, they had to go through some trouble to find people for that rewrite who had not looked at Microsoft's source code AND the parts of the Wine/ReactOS source code that needed to be rewritten.
So I am convinced that they will make extra sure not to even get in the position where someone could imply they might have looked at that source code.