Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 11:06:26 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: gpalmer@freebsd.org (Gary Palmer) Cc: isdmill@gatekeeper.ddp.state.me.us, agifford@infowest.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, bsdi-users@BSDI.COM Subject: Re: Adaptec2940UW vs. BusLogicBT-958 (opinions?) Message-ID: <199606121806.LAA06424@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <28839.834547540@palmer.demon.co.uk> from "Gary Palmer" at Jun 12, 96 03:45:40 am
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> What on earth made you think that we reverse engineered their driver > to write ours? If nothing else, thats ILLEGAL. Actually, to be illegal, we would have to accept Adaptec's assertion of an interface copyright as being valid. The closest thing to an interface copyright that has been upheld is the Lotus/VIP "look and feel" suit (I'm still waiting for Visicalc to sue Lotus). The interface copyright asserted by Ashton-Tate on dBase III's script interpreter (against Clipper, Inc., a manufacturer of a compiler for the same script language) was *not* upheld. It would probably be inconvenient to defend against an interface copyright lawsuit asserted by Adaptec following a clean-room reverse-engineering, but it certainly would not be impossible to win. In case you are wondering, the Microsoft/Stacker "deep reverse engineering" (the information which was so obtained being published in the Adrian King book on Windows95's boot process and the DOS boot process) was upheld because Stacker failed to use clean-room techniques (2 teams). Anyway, enough trivia -- back to hacking code. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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