I am just reading up on the relationship between reverse engineering and derived works.
This article seems to apply to all open source licenses, not just the GPL. www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/linux/gpl-ucc2b.html Does anyone care to comment? mike www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/linux/gpl-ucc2b.html [[ It appears that the General Public License's restrictions on derived works can be circumvented if one is able to reverse-engineer a piece of GPL'd software (that is, without consulting the source code). UCC Article 2B's stance seems to be that reverse-engineering would be an infringement of a license (which otherwise prohibits reverse-engineering) only if the property rights (e.g., copyright) were actually violated in order to reverse engineer --- for example, if a copy of the code were made in order to disassemble it. Since the GPL places no restriction on activities such as these, it may be the case that GPL'd code can be reverse-engineered and a new work created based on the technology within the GPL'd code, which the GPL itself does not cover. Article 2B specifically does not address this issue which could raise problems for GPL'd software in particular. The GPL is based on the assumption that any derived work based on GPL'd software must make use of the source code, which is not necessarily true. ]] ===== James Michael DuPont http://introspector.sourceforge.net/ __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
