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WINE is an implementation of Win32; Samba is an implementation of the CIFS protocol; both Win32 and CIFS are Microsoft specifications and inventions. I still don't see the difference. "

Samba is an implementation of the SMB protocol (after which Samba is named). SMB is IBM's invention.

Local LAN network functionality which is implemented on top of SMB has heaps of prior art in Novell Netware. Any patents that apply here are probably Novell patents, donated to the Patent Commons, which would work in defence of Linux rather than against it.

http://www.patentcommons.org/

Wine is largely not an implementation of win32, so much as it a translation between calls made by application to the win32 ABI standard being intercepted by the Wine layer and then translated into the equivalent calls to the Linux kernel and drivers. In this way, WINE works in an entirely different way to Windows. However, some Windows ABI functions do not have a direct close equivalent in the Linux kernel, and hence are implement directly in WINE. However, even here, Microsoft-held patents are NOT likely to apply, because there is any amount of prior art in applications making calls to operating systems.

Caveat: one could probably argue also that there is prior art for .NET (Mono) functionality in the form of Java, and prior art for Silverlight (Moonlight) functionality in the form of Flash, and hence Microsoft can hold no valid patents in these technologies either, but it would be a far more difficult argument to make this case.

Edited 2009-06-18 07:08 UTC