On 01/01/07 09:12 +0530, Amish Mehta wrote: > On 12/30/06, Philip Tellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Sometime Today, Amish Mehta assembled some asciibets to say: > > > >> Samba is what? Reverse engineering. Isnt it? Microsoft cant to > >> anything about it. > > > >You're confusing software and protocols. A software's licence can > >prohibit reverse engineering the software itself. A protocol cannot be > >protected by a licence. > > As far as I know for knowing SMB protocol, MS Windows was > reverse engineered, probably to know exactly how passwords are > passed. Same is true for this Pacenet issue. > No. They used a network sniffer to figure out the network protocol, but they never touched the Windows code itself.
> Wine, OpenOffice.org are also other examples of reverse engineering > certain softwares. > Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API. Pretty public information. OOo uses filters for document formats, not code. > The issue is if you can reverse engineer a software or not, whatever it > is done for. Dont count on it but my opinion is as long as its not patented > and its for personal use and it does not harm anyone, it should be ok. > Software reverse engineering was pretty clearcut in the US from 1984 till the DMCA was passed. Properly done reverse engineering started the PC revolution (yay for Compaq). Patents harm software development simply by existing. Any implementation of the same process would still result in infringement. Devdas Bhagat -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
