Jonathan Wilson wrote:
What I am doing here is clean-room reverse engineering.
There's no reason that we need to expose ourselves to any legal risk at all. It may be your opinion that reading assembly code and describing it is legal and safe, but I don't agree and I'm sure others who work on Wine don't either.
The original IBM BIOS was clean room reverse engineered because there was not enough documentation available for it. We have MSDN, which is not 100% complete, but is good enough for most purposes. Other things can be deduced from test programs. Information that cannot be deduced by a test program is irrelevant.
Reverse engineering does not help Wine. Casual observers will assume that Wine is the result of reverse engineering by disassembly, which is incorrect and harmful.
Mike