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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199606121806.LAA06424@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: Adaptec2940UW vs. BusLogicBT-958 (opinions?)
To: gpalmer@freebsd.org (Gary Palmer)
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 11:06:26 -0700 (MST)
Cc: isdmill@gatekeeper.ddp.state.me.us, agifford@infowest.com,
        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, bsdi-users@BSDI.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.