25 Mar
2005
25 Mar
'05
3:16 a.m.
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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