*** Quoting Mike Bilow to Kevin Ring dated 05-27-95 ***
> This sort of thing has been done, most notably by Sun's "Windows 
> Application Binary Interface (WABI)" and Linux's recursively named 
> "WINE Is Not an Emulator (WINE)."  The obstacles are probably legal 
> rather than technical, since the API may be considered a proprietary 
> piece of intellectual property. The law on this is complicated, and the
> standard counterclaim would be that reverse engineering has always been
> legal under U.S. law and is considered essential in the promotion of 
> competition.
(A lot deleted)

I can understand how there might be some legal issues with such a program,
but I assumed it would have legal implications similar to those of Cyrix
essentially "emulating" the Intel instruction set.  Although I'm
sure I don't know the whole story, Intel took Cyrix to court over its use
of the name 386, 486, etc, but could do nothing about their use of the
Intel instruction set.  

There are also programs like OSTSR, that, although on a much smaller scale,
emulate the API of other programs.  (OSTSR emulates part of the Desqview
API in order to convert the released time slices into OS/2 time slice
releases)

There's also the fact that doing this wouldn't require any kind of reverse
engineering, only the documents provided publicly from Microsoft and IBM. 
I would imagine that unless they say specifically you can't use them for
something like this, there would be nothing they could do about it...

Or maybe not.. :)

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