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

[Jonathan Wilson]

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.