Wine disassembly and reverse engineering rules.

[Kai Blin]

On Sunday 05 August 2007 18:06:28 Jakob Eriksson wrote:
> Kai Blin wrote:
> > On Sunday 05 August 2007 04:23:15 Peter Dons Tychsen wrote:
> >> It was regarding the fact that it is not allowed to disassemble and
> >> reverse engineer Microsoft DLLs. I understand this part, as their
> >> license prohibits it (EULA).
> >
> > Please note that "reverse engineering by disassembly" is not the same
> > as "reverse engineering by black box testing". The former is not only
> > disallowed by many license agreements, it's actually a violation of
> > copyright in most (western) countries.
>
> Not all western countries by far.
[...]
> Dissambling is not illegal. Disassembling and then writing another
> implementation
> is against copyright.
> [snip MSDN etc]

Well, I'm talking about "in the context of using the results for Wine".
I was also simplifying. However, given that the USA seem to consider the 
internet to be under their jurisdiction, the US legal system seems to be par 
for the interpretation of all of this.

> I also can't see how it would be illegal to, for instance, person A
> disassembling a DLL,  then writing documentation for that DLL.
> Then for person B to  reimplement said DLL  by means of the
> specification specified by person A. 
>
> This is how Compaq legally reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS. I don't 
> see how there  would be any difference writing the documentation as unit
> tests or english. 
>
> I.e. disassembling for the purpose of creating unit tests must be ok, 
> AFAIK. 

Why would you even bother to disassemble to write a unit test? All Wine cares 
about is "What's the output of function X when I put in Y and Z as 
parameters?". That's why you write a conformance test that will run on 
Windows. Then you make Wine behave the same. No need to disassemble anything 
there.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer        http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member     http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
--
Will code for cotton.
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