What's the legality behind OS emulation? I know it's perfectly legal (from case study) to emulate consoles and other software so long as the programming used by the emulator doesn't share the programming used for the emulated product, but has any case been made for OS emulation at the kernel level?
If, for example, A protocol was implemented in an OS to abandon its kernel and emulate NT and Darwin processes which, of course with some extra mingling, would allow programs compiled for mac or windows to be run alongside native applications, would that be illegal? or, rather than do that, simply writing measures to emulate the functions needed to run .exe files?
Note: This is a discussion on legality, not plausibility. Yes, I know it's extremely hard to emulate an OS, and yes, i know the methods i've presented are technologically implausible, but think in terms of how it would be legal, not how it would be feasible
>>61901532
As long as the code used to emulate the OS isn't stolen from the company that developed the OS, it should be completely legal.
>>61901532
OP, think about it for a moment. Entire corporate enterprises are based on software stacks over an emulated environment or hyperviser. Your question is about as silly as asking if turning on your water faucet constitutes as stealing from your local municipality.
You just reinvented WINE.
>>61902150
1) Wine is not an emulator
2) Wine does not work at the kernel level (from what I understand)
>>61901962
>Entire corporate enterprises are based on software stacks over an emulated environment or hyperviser
Do they sell those solutions? I'm pretty sure an in-house solution is legal, but to sell it as a feature in your software?
>>61901532
What you're talking about is whether APIs are copyrightable.
I would like to refer you to the Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
>>61902215
How about reverse wine aka. Windows subsystem for Linux (what a shitty name)? AFAIK it reimplements the Linux kernel API and ABI to run native Linux binaries. I don't see them open sourcing it in GPLv2 though.