| 7 Jan 2026 |
 Randy Eckenrode | If we had an “APIs are not copyrightable” ruling, I assume it would be possible to argue that there’s no case and get it dismissed. | 15:46:46 |
 emily | I can imagine a "well Swift is different from Java you know, we are the experts after all!" 😅 | 15:47:21 |
| emily | but yeah agreed that the line is further out because of that | 15:47:39 |
 eveeifyeve | So would it be considered fair use? If so do I still link the licence or just have license.publicDomain? | 15:48:32 |
| emily | "we are not even reimplementing like Google did, this is pure interoperability for use with Apple hardware and software" is also pretty strong otoh. | 15:48:47 |
| eveeifyeve | Because it is important to have a meta.license if it's public domain and also a comment explaining the reasons to it. | 15:50:24 |
| eveeifyeve | * Because it is important to have a meta.license if it's uncopyrightable/fair use and also a comment explaining the reasons to it. | 15:50:43 |
| emily | if we are going to tag it, I would probably go with lib.licenses.free with an explanatory comment that we strip the SDK to only the symbol lists and header files required for interoperability and remove all the encumbered binary code | 15:50:43 |
| emily | public domain is not quite right | 15:50:52 |
| emily | SPDX is reviewing an "uncopyrightable" licence IIRC | 15:51:04 |
| emily | but I don't think it has an assigned identifier yet | 15:51:26 |
| emily | I'm wary of making explicit copyright/licensing assertions here though. free is generic enough to hopefully be fine | 15:52:59 |
| emily | btw there are like, thousands of packages without licenses tagged in the tree | 15:53:15 |
| emily | would be good to fix, but we definitely have way more dubious stuff than the SDK | 15:53:35 |
| emily | until last release we accidentally had entire encumbered Android system images gigabytes big getting pushed into the cache 🫣 | 15:54:22 |
| eveeifyeve | 💀 | 15:55:58 |
| emily | FWIW preemptively: the Windows SDK has many proprietary binaries that would need to be stripped (like MSVC) for similar arguments to apply there, as well as DLLs (LIB import libraries for those DLLs should not be copyrightable, but not every LIB is an import library), and I believe it also has a lot of C++ which is much more likely to contain substantial copyrightable program logic in header files | 15:56:46 |
| emily | and I believe that those DLLs are things you actually need to redistribute for programs to work rather than being able to use them from the OS like macOS system APIs | 15:57:30 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Doesn’t MinGW and Wine provide potential, alternative SDK options? | 15:57:35 |
| emily | UCRT comes with the system, but the non-U runtime wouldn't fall under all of this | 15:57:59 |
| Randy Eckenrode | True, but isn’t UCRT preferred now? | 15:58:17 |
| eveeifyeve | We have permission to redistrobute it however the program requires you to accept the license. | 15:58:21 |
| emily | to an extent. MinGW is not ABI-compatible or header-compatible. the reason I'm discussing this is because I brought up Windows SDK licensing in the past which I assume led to this | 15:58:48 |
| eveeifyeve | * We have permission to redistribute it, however the program requires you to accept the license hinse why we have config.config.microsoftVisualStudioLicenseAccepted becoming an option. | 15:59:23 |
| emily | can you cite the licence wording granting third parties permission to redistribute the Windows SDK in its entirety? | 15:59:51 |
| emily | it should be possible to strip down the Windows SDK similarly, I am just not sure how useful the resulting thing would be. it should suffice to get you headers and linker stubs to compile things with Clang for UCRT | 16:02:27 |
| emily | but certainly wouldn't cover MSVC itself or any binary code in DLLs | 16:02:57 |
| eveeifyeve | you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. For more information, see www.microsoft.com/licensing.
You may not
work around any technical limitations in the software;
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One user may use copies of the software to develop and test their applications.
| 16:07:36 |
| eveeifyeve | Under https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mt644918/ | 16:07:54 |
| emily | that's not a licence to redistribute at all | 16:08:31 |
