<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">Thank you all very much for the clarification, it is exceedingly helpful! I don't care to look at microsoft's code because I doubt I have the stomach for it! But now I feel much better, that I wasn't doing anything wrong by examining the program state of the misbehaving app (it was on wine anyway). I don't mind jumping through hoops of various sizes to isolate a problem, but to have to do that without debugging, yikes!, that's like having both hands tied behind your back!<br><br>--- On <b>Wed, 5/13/09, Roderick Colenbrander <i><thunderbird2k@gmail.com></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k@gmail.com><br>Subject: Re: Wine policy question: What is considered "reverse engineering"/what is acceptable?<br>To:
"Jerome Leclanche" <adys.wh@gmail.com><br>Cc: daniel.santos@pobox.com, wine-devel@winehq.org<br>Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 3:11 PM<br><br><div class="plainMail">On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:02 PM, Jerome Leclanche <<a ymailto="mailto:adys.wh@gmail.com" href="/mc/compose?to=adys.wh@gmail.com">adys.wh@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> I thought reverse engineering was only relevant to MS code? As in<br>> reverse engineering of windows dlls and so on; another application<br>> would be irrelevant.<br>><br>> That's what I understood from it anyway.<br><br>First of all I'm not a lawyer ;)<br><br>Correct you should avoid looking at windows code. Regarding Microsoft<br>code we only allow black box reverse engineering, so you feed the dll<br>with some input and check the outcome without looking what happens<br>inside (so without checking debug logs of MS dlls). Looking at<br>Microsoft debug traces should be avoided as it is similar
to<br>disassembling a program IF it is for the purpose of figuring out what<br>the black box is doing.<br><br>Looking at debug traces of programs is fine and as I said it is<br>similar to looking at the output of a disassembler. Sure it can happen<br>that you are looking at calls made by Microsoft code since some<br>Microsoft dlls are being used but you are not aware of that and you<br>are not trying to reverse engineer the particular Microsoft dll, so<br>that would also be fine (though it is a gray area).<br><br>Roderick<br></div></blockquote></td></tr></table><br>