Wine disassembly and reverse engineering rules.

[Jakob Eriksson]

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.

> Reverse engineering by black box testing is an established and legal method in 
> industry. Wine uses this method extensively by writing test cases.
>
>   
>> However, i would be more clear if someone would make these rules
>> commonly available on the WineHQ website.
>>     
>
> [Omitting a quote about disassembly being useless]
>
>   
>> This should probably be fixed. It should make it crystal clear was is
>> allowed and what is not. This would help avoid situation like the one
>> mentioned above.
>>     
>
> It's also not allowed to break other laws while developing software. Where 
> would you draw the line? Disassembling software is (almost always) illegal. 
> Killing people is illegal. Should both be in the development guide? I would 
> assume common sense would tell people that they should only do things that 
> are legal.
>   

Dissambling is not illegal. Disassembling and then writing another
implementation
is against copyright.
[snip MSDN etc]

> This is the common sense I was talking about before. Thank you for asking.
>
>   
>> Please think long and hard before you reply.
>>     
>
> The usual disclaimer about how I'm not a lawyer and can't give legal advice 
> applies, of course. But a rule of thumb is: "If you never looked at 
> disassembled code and you are using tests using the Windows APIs to determine 
> how the API you're interested in works, you're fine."
>
>   

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.


regards,
Jakob