[ros-dev] Re: I think I know how uxtheme works...

[Royce Mitchell III]

My understanding is that the engineer who reversed the IBM BIOS, created 
a document describing interface and function only. IOTW, I don't believe 
it covered how the interfaces and functionality were even implemented. I 
could be wrong, but I think it's important to document only the bare 
minimum necessary to have a compatible binary interface, i.e. not HOW it 
works, or how things interact, but just interface, and expected behavior 
of those interfaces.

Jonathan Wilson wrote:

> What I am doing here is clean-room reverse engineering.
> Essentially it involves taking existing binary modules and sources of 
> information and writing up what they do in a way that isnt violating 
> the copyright on the origonal (IANAL but I dont think what I posted 
> violates the copyright on the windows binaries).
> Then it involves someone else who hasnt seen the origonal copyrighted 
> source using the resulting information to re-implement whatever the 
> information describes.
>
> As long as the person who origonally did the reverse engineering never 
> contributes anything to the resulting code, it is (AFAIK, IAMAL) 
> perfectly legal (after all, this is exactly what was done when the 
> first clone PC bios was written, one group disassembled the origonal 
> IBM BIOS and wrote up documents on how it works and how to talk to it. 
> Then another group not connected to the people who did the origonal 
> reverse engineering took the documentation and re-implemented the BIOS 
> from just the documentation without looking at the orgininal IBM 
> implementation)
>
> I never had any plans to actually write code for this (since doing so 
> is out of my skill range) and as long as I never do so in the future 
> (thus "tainting" the code I write as being a potential Derived Work of 
> the microsoft code I looked at), I dont see any way that the results 
> of this investigation could be considered a derived work of any 
> microsoft code.
>
> Although if I have a mis-understanding of this situation, please point 
> out what I am doing that would make code written by someone else using 
> the information in my posts a Derived Work of microsofts origonal 
> binaries.
>
>
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