Looks like the WINE developers are going to have the time of their lives.
2. If microsoft sued wine devs it would be horrible for Microsofts public image. They won't do it.
3. I hope the WINE devs don't listen to you.
Get the court to order discovery on all of your computers. They could probably also get subpoenas for the source code hosting sites to reveal relevant access logs. Or someone could admit to reading the source code someplace public, like a bug tracker. Or they could argue that the choice of variable names and minor details of algorithm details are too close to be coincidence. A jury convicted Google because of rangeCheck, after all.
> 2. If microsoft sued wine devs it would be horrible for Microsofts public image. They won't do it.
No it wouldn't, particularly not if they had a strong case (e.g., someone bragging about it). If you think MS looks bad for suing people for stealing the code, then you'd have to think the FSF looks bad for suing people for violating the GPL and stealing the code of, say, Linux.
> 3. I hope the WINE devs don't listen to you.
I hope they don't listen to you. The repercussions are quite large--it's not unimaginable that shutting down the WINE project could result from a lost case. These cases do happen, and defendants do lose (Oracle v. Google is a notable recent one, and that's based on IMHO fairly weak evidence). There's a reason that projects that do major reverse engineering for interoperability have rather elaborate procedures for doing so.
I agree with your, but there are people who argue this.
This might be a boon for the ReactOS folks, who are trying to implement the NT kernel, except for seeing the Windows source code automatically disqualifies you from being a contributor.
If anything, this could make their legal situation more sticky.
What kind of an audit can you do without access to the original software's source code? How would you tell if it's actually different?
But IIUC, clean room reverse engineering requires substantial effort to prove you did not take any shortcuts.
IIRC, they had to go through some trouble to find people for that rewrite who had not looked at Microsoft's source code AND the parts of the Wine/ReactOS source code that needed to be rewritten.
So I am convinced that they will make extra sure not to even get in the position where someone could imply they might have looked at that source code.