Looking at this week's poll on sections people want, it is pretty obvious that people want Boot screens.

This puts WinCustomize into an odd position. Users often hear about "ripping" which is where someone takes another person's images and uses them in their own work without permission.

The problem with boot screens is that a "boot screen" is actually the Windows XP kernal, modified with new bitmaps, put into a ZIP file. Ignoring the support issues, there's the question: Is it okay for people to distribute the actual kernel of Windows XP in a zip file?

But this problem isn't just with boot screens. Logon screens often come with a replacement logonui.exe. It's the literal logonui.exe on your system that someone has modified and reuploaded. That's why WinCustomize's logon section uses LogonStudio because it has its own format .logonxp which allows people to make logons that don't have to include the actual logonui.exe.

And many "visual styles" that use .msstyles format include a file called shellstyles.dll which, again, is the literal .dll from a person's Windows directory.

In all these examples, these files are copyrighted by Microsoft. And I don't mean copyright in the same sense that an OS skin might be. I mean they are literally the code for the program. If Apple, for intance, gets mad about Aqua style skins on occasion, you can imagine how they would react if people were passing around the actual system files from MacOS X.  Microsoft must be aware of this stuff but so far doesn't seem to have a problem with it.

As a skinning site, we want to have the kinds of sections people want to have.  And in fact, every other major skinning site already has sections for these kinds of things.  So we are torn on this situation. Our inclination is to put up a boot section since so many people want them and every other skin site already has them. But we're uneasy in doing this because of the potential copyright issues.

So that's where we are. Please no responses with "I don't know why anyone would want to replace their boot screen" or "We should put section X up instead." I think we can all agree that there is a large demand for boot screen. The question is what is the best course of action.