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.

[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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