Wine development stifled by software patent

Published: 13 May 2005 10:05 BST

Developers on the Windows compatibility project Wine have been forced to abandon an important feature due to the existence of a Borland patent.

The open source project Wine allows you to run unmodified Windows programs on Linux through a binary compatibility layer. It also allows you to compile Windows applications to create a Linux binary through a tool called Winelib. In a talk at the annual Wine Developer Conference in Stuttgart earlier this month, Wine developer Dimitrie Paun said that the development of Winelib is restricted by a Borland software patent.

A Borland spokeswoman said it did not have sufficient information on the patent or the open source project to comment on the situation.

Concerns about the Borland patent have prevented developers on the GCC project from adding structured exception handling (SEH) to the free software compiler. As SEH is commonly used in code that runs on the Windows platform, Wine users that want to use the Winelib feature must either modify their source code to remove SEH constructs or rely on a proprietary compiler, such as Microsoft's MSVC.

Paun told Builder UK on Thursday that relying on proprietary compilers is an unsatisfactory solution, and could impact the adoption of free software projects built for the Windows platform. "From a long term perspective, this is a problem because it means GCC is not even an option for people," said Paun. "They cannot adopt the native Linux toolchain, and they are stuck with using the Windows tools indefinitely."

"Having your FOSS project depend on a non-free tool can be a big problem in terms of adoption. Many distributions, such as Fedora [a free Linux distribution], have a principle of using only free software — they wouldn't be able to distribute such a package as they wouldn't be able to build it."

Paun said that software patents, such as the Borland patent, shouldn't be allowed, as they give large corporations an advantage over open source projects and SMEs. "Software patents are senseless and immoral," said Paun. "They slow down progress and cost everybody with the notable exception of a few very wealthy corporations that have signed cross-licensing deals."

Wine isn't the only open source project forced into an unsatisfactory work-around to avoid violating a patent. Last month, developer on the open source database PostgreSQL said that they had rewritten a piece of code to avoid violating an IBM patent.

Despite the growing number of examples of open source projects needing to rewrite code to avoid violating patents, the UK patent office has denied that the European software patent directive, which is due to go to parliament for a second reading in July, poses any threat to open source software.