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I wonder whether it's actually legal to extract & independently redistribute these libraries. https://github.com/haileys/vc6-sys/tree/main/sdk/lib


Those files just reflect the publicly available Windows SDK, so it is pretty much ok to extract them - they reflect just a public domain knowledge. Actually, you can even create your own libraries with special tools like IMPLIB.


The license says you cannot redistribute the debug version of the libraries.

That’s okay though because the build tools are freely available from Microsoft. Don’t bundle them - just tell your users where to get them or auto-download them with wget or something like that.


That you can’t distribute the specific compilation of publicly available knowledge is different from recompiling (even all) that same knowledge into your own work.

It’s why you can publish and have copyright over a book of quotes from dead people, but no copyright over the individual quotes themselves (which are in the public domain).


in the usa (and i think in berne convention countries in general) some quotes are long enough to be copyrightable, and the copyright can last decades after the author's death


SDK headers and linker symbols for core system libraries would enjoy very strong fair use protections, though. You can thank Oracle and Google for that.


some fair use protections, but not very strong ones




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