Running Visual Basic application without Microsoft licenses

Jani Laakso <[email protected]> Fri, 23 Jan 2004 14:56:26 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.comp.emulators.wine.license
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Our company has a need to run an legacy VB program under linux using 
Wine. Now I am wondering can we do this or not (is it legal?). As 
everyone knows, Visual Basic applications needs Visual Basic Runtime 
(e.g. VBRun60.exe). We have Visual Basic .net Professional license and 
therefore we can deploy our product to all our clients, but in this case 
we would like to deploy our program to machines that have no Microsoft 
licenses (if possible).

In short:
Is it legal to copy following files to our client's linux machines:
The file needed is VBRun60.exe, actually when unpacked it contains:
15.07.1997  06:53            74 960 ADVPACK.DLL
17.06.1998  22:32           147 728 ASYCFILT.DLL
31.05.1998  03:06            22 288 COMCAT.DLL
24.06.1998  13:43         1 409 024 msvbvm60.dll
17.06.1998  22:33           598 288 OLEAUT32.DLL
17.06.1998  22:33           164 112 OLEPRO32.DLL
16.06.1998  11:13            17 920 STDOLE2.TLB
30.06.2000  13:45             1 069 vbrun60.inf
15.07.1997  06:53             2 272 W95INF16.DLL
15.07.1997  06:53             4 608 W95INF32.DLL

This file can be found from:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=192461

Any comments are greatly welcome as even Microsoft seems to be wondering 
what their licenses mean, and this case is not trivial.

The VB application itself is pretty simple and if it can be run under 
Wine legally, then we can same over fifty Windows 2000 licenses all 
thanks to Wine.


Best Regards, Jani Laakso

-- 
Jani Laakso / IT Mill Ltd | Tel. +358 40 5898086 | http://www.itmill.com