[ros-general] Browsers

[Nate DeSimone]

Codeweavers only supports Internet Explorer versions that come with 
Office, however they don't support installing it by itself, which I do 
think is due to licensing issues.  I have actually looked at the IE EULA 
recently and they still claim that you may only use IE with a valid copy 
of Windows.  So even if the user installed IE via Office, I think its 
definitely still in the gray area as far a legality goes, so when your 
talking about a project like ReactOS where M$ will sue it for whatever 
they can, we should cover our ass as much as we can. (Well as soon as 
name ReactOS actually reaches a guy in upper management at M$ they will 
start suing anyway.)  Thus, we need to replace the browser (just like we 
have to replace the DLLs and not simply copy M$ DLLs into our 
distribution.)  That is why I recommended that we take Firebird and 
modify it so that it will accept ActiveX controls and have a COM 
interface, that way we will maintain compatibility and still be legal, 
and Firebird is better than IE anyway, and its going to be "the next 
mozilla" so it will save time later by just starting with it.


Vizzini wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 03:44, Colin Burn wrote:
>  
>
>>What would happen if you installed IE on ReactOS?
>>
>>Does the licence allow this?
>>    
>>
>
>At the moment, it depends.  CodeWeavers installs MS Office (legal,
>according to the Office EULA), which itself installs IE, without ever
>asking for the IE license agreement.  Therefore, so they say, this is
>just fine.
>
>I think (but haven't checked lately) that the current IE license
>requires the user to own a Windows license, which is still almost always
>the case, but hopefully not forever.  It does this by claiming that IE
>is an operating system component.
>
>I personally don't believe that MS can enforce that requirement, but we
>have a *lot* of thinking and planning to do before I'd be comfortable
>actually recommending that someone ignore a license agreement. 
>Certainly that is *not* the current position of this project.
>
> -Vizzini
>
>
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