On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 09:47 -0300, A Rafael D Teixeira wrote: > It is illegal to reverse engineer .NET, in most countries anyway...
In what country is it illegal to reverse engineer *anything*? Certainly not the U.S.A. The only typical restrictions are 1. That it be for compatibility 2. That it be "black box" reverse engineering. Mono, Samba, Wine, and even the original Compaq BIOS (which sparked the PC Clone Wars) all meet these horribly onerous restrictions. :-) Just to clarify, white box reverse engineering would include decompiling .NET IL code. This is obviously bad, because it opens you up to copyright infringement (among other potential issues). Black box reverse engineering would include writing unit tests against .NET to identify and clarify its behavior, and then implement Mono to conform to the unit tests. Oddly, this is exactly what we do. :-) > Mono is open source, so you don't need to reverse engineer anything... Certainly you don't need to reverse-engineer Mono... Unless you need to implement something under an incompatible license... - Jon _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - Mono-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
