Date: Fri, 21 Apr 95 11:08:42 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: DIGIBOARD driver in ~julian Message-ID: <9504211708.AA03664@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199504210658.IAA07682@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Apr 21, 95 08:58:44 am
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> > How about decompiling the SCO driver ? Russian copyright law explicitly
> > allows decompiling of software for studying the interface of
> > hardware or software.
>
> Huuh! Use this right as long as you can. :-)
>
> Remember Terry's note about `cleanrooming'. *You*'re the guys who
> could provide people outside with the cleanroomed interface
> descriptions.
>
> I'm sure, Russia will get enough pressure from the western countries
> to adopt to the western copyright laws.
Just so people don't think they can't do this in the US, don't be
fooled: this is perfectly legal in the US aw well, and is how Phoenix
wrote their BIOS.
There was a recent court case where Microsoft won against Stacker on
the basis of drawing a distinction between "Reverse Engineering",
which is perfectly legal ain the US, and "Deep Reverse Engineering",
a term best spoken into a coffee can to get those Darth Vader-like
echoes.
In the US, civil cases are decided on the basis of "preponderance of
evidence", while criminal cases are on the basis of "beyond a
resonable doubt". All Microsoft had to do is make their pile of
legal briefs and amicus curie ("friend of the court") briefs weigh
more than Stacker's.
What stacker did is use the same engineers to disaddemble Microsoft's
DOS and Windows AND to write the code (hence the "Deep" and hence
their legal loss).
I really urge that people look into cleanrooming before assuming that
the only place it can be done is a non-Berne signatory or non-Gatt
signatory country.
This is a totally different matter from the obscure crypto laws we
have, which are mostly enforcible only through local laws of similar
scope in other countries, or direct alliance with the US (NATO, etc.),
and for which there are already well known workarounds (the Brasil
and South African repositories being examples).
I wouldn't have replied, but the message to which I'm responding
implies a limitation to where you are allowed to cleanroom which
simply does not exist. If people took this to heart, it would
artificially restrict the pool of talent that can be used for
cleanroom coding -- and that would be a bad thing.
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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