27 Jan
2006
27 Jan
'06
11:49 a.m.
Martin Fuchs wrote:
<snip>
Steven,
I can't sign this point 4) and your hope for some court case. The rule doesn't
go far enough. You know the vote about this point was only a vote by majority.
To be sure to avoid any legal problems, anyone who had access to
the leaked code should not contribute anything to at least that parts,
which are covered by the leaked source code. This covers any area
of the leaked code - just to be sure. Of course it would be better to
abstain from that developer completely.
Actually we wanted to propose one more vote to make auditing of all the
future contributions by the developers who had a copy of the Windows
source code (only for contributions to part covered by the leak, those
tools and such wouldn't be covered), but most of the European developers
were already sleeping (or preparing to sleep) at that time, so it was
cancelled and further discussion was held.
In my mind it's not important if there has been
some court order.
I can remember quite clear the time, when the news about the leaked
Windows source code came up. The advice at Wine and also here
was to _not_ look at those code in any case. Who did it nevertheless
should have known what he did. At least in my mind it's only allowed
to look at some code if the author (in this case Microsoft) permitted it.
Agreed.
Be there a valid juridical trade secret or not... Work
derived from such
illegitimate looks should be avoided in a free implementation of
Windows at any means.
Agreed again, but the point is that at least some of the people (if not
all) haven't looked at the source code. Of course implementing something
based on that code or knowledge gained from it would be VERY WRONG, at
least in my opinion.
Regards,
Filip