On 9/21/07, Shachar Shemesh shachar@shemesh.biz wrote:
Shachar Shemesh wrote:
Here's the law as I know it. As far as I know, it is quite identical in the US and in Israel in that regard:
Just to make it clear, as far as I can see it, even with the above, it is still illegal to accept code from RoS (you are not allowed to copy code from the MS source code, or even from your own effort of translating the assembly to C, without violating copyright).
All I'm saying is that the rules are not as strict as we sometimes play them to be.
The article at [1] provides interesting information regarding reverse engineering of all types. More importantly, the author provides a list of cases that provide legal precedence for the legality (or lack thereof) of reverse engineering. The most important thing to keep in mind when considering the legality of reverse engineering is that there is no fine line when it comes to the act, and any new case can overturn all the legal precedence that comes before it. The Wine project has succeeded thus far without using reverse engineering, and will continue to do so, so there's no reason to take the legal risk of accepting code form the ReactOS project, or from anyone that has seen or reverse engineered Microsoft code, clean room or otherwise.
[1] http://www.jenkins-ip.com/serv/serv_6.htm