Hi, First of all, none of us are lawyers. But in Denmark at least, there is a law that says reverse engineering is legal if the purpose is interoperability. That is the case with FreeSCI (if the purpose of FreeSCI isn't interoperability, what is?), while it would be more difficult to make that argument in the context of SCI Studio. I think such a law exists in all of EU.
My point was more like this: We know that the ScummVM team has received nasty letters in the past. We have not, and we would like to keep it that way. We also know that their views on reverse engineering are less strict than ours. It stands to reason that any change in policy here would endanger the project. Theoretically, the code would have to be written from documentation. In principle, that would mean I couldn't touch the FreeSCI code at all, since I have looked extensively at the SCI code (both interpreter code and the compiled games). In practice, we don't always do that. For a specific example, when I was implementing SCI1 graphics support, I had a look at some view decompression code that was written by a guy called Carl Muckenhoupt some 15 years ago. Looking at the relevant routines in that code, it is clear that they were obtained through straight reverse enginering, and that he wasn't exactly sure what the code did. I rewrote this code, looking alternately at Carl's code and the original machine code in SCI (which was very similar, for the mentioned reason). As it stands, I threw away some obsolete buffering code that Carl had kept (simplifying it somewhat), and I made a number of other adjustments. Readability alone made this the right thing to do, and this would likely be the case with other reverse-engineered routines as well. For all I know, SCI Studio uses Carl's code unchanged. On the other hand, large parts of SCI Studio were written completely from scratch. I suppose if you ask me first before including anything specific, it would be alright. Also, I have more complete documentation on some things than Brian Provinciano did, so the message viewer (for one thing) should be rewritten anyway. It depends on what you want to add - and besides, we're not ready for SCI32 support just yet! :-) Lars _______________________________________________ FreeSCI-develop mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freesci-develop
