POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Compiling stuff : Re: Compiling stuff Server Time
3 Nov 2024 01:08:15 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Compiling stuff  
From: Nicolas Alvarez
Date: 15 Dec 2008 18:03:07
Message: <4946e22b@news.povray.org>
Jim Henderson wrote:
> Reverse-engineering is not generally illegal.  There are specific
> techniques used in reverse-engineering to make sure you don't include
> patented code or whatnot - like "clean room" reverse engineering.
> 
> In that, you have one team that determines the specs (within software,
> this would be the inputs and outputs of function calls).  You compile a
> specification for those functions.
> 
> Then you turn the specifications over to a second team that has not
> looked at the code for the original and have them reimplement it.

Fact is you can implement quite a bit of Windows reading *official*
documentation... After all, the API docs say what functions do.

Clean-room reverse engineering then "only" (ha!) needs to be used for the
undocumented details.


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