Legal issues with having Linux use Windows device drivers

["Geoffrey L. Brimhall" <brimhall@pobox.com>]

Aside from the technical issues of having Linux use windows device drivers
(such as the video card drivers), are there any legal reasons why a person
could not use the device drivers written for the MS Windows operating system ?

There are two areas that I could think of, if any one could shed some light on
 these two, or bring up some more issues, I'd appreciate it.

The first question is the basic licensing of the driver - I don't think this is
an issues because I would think the license is attached with the
hardware installed on the machine. So I wouldn't think it matters if the device
driver is being used on Linux or Windows.

The other issue is whether or not the device api set which the drivers use to
communicate with the windows operating system are proprietary or not. They are
certainly an open, published api set (look at the DDK part of the
Microsoft MSDN, where most of these entry points are described). The question
is whether Microsoft owns all rights to usage of these entry points ? If they
don't, then it seems like some kernel drivers could be written which supply
these api points and map them to pertinant UNIX io, thus allowing usage of the
drivers.

Thanks !
Geoff