On Sat, 17 Mar 2001 10:01:26 -0800
Willow Schlanger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What if we use Plex86 to reverse engineer Windows 9x, and then write
> documentation, and send it to Wine developers? Is that legal? I'd love
> to do that... if it's legal.
Questionable. Quite a grey area.
You would have to send them specs, I guess, not a BYTE of code.
This kind of thing has happened a lot: The Phoenix BIOS was made that way.
DRI/Novell/Caldera reverse-engineered MSDOS a lot, usually to bypass traps
that Microsoft had set for them (e.g. PSP(0), the Windows 3.1 trap and
WinGlue, which (with a few glitches) ran Windows 95 on top of DRDOS.)
Now DRDOS was closed-source (and when it was 'not-quite-open', a lot of comments
were taken away because they were 'inappropriate') so there wasn't really much
way to prove that this took place.
An old DRI hand I spoke to once told me that he reckoned Microsoft never sued
or threatened DRI over DRDOS, because Microsoft had stolen lots of CP/M code
from *them* by reverse-engineering when they made MSDOS or QDOS, so they kept
quiet unless they got found out themselves.
I guess a lot of whether it's good or right to do this kind of thing depends
on how provable it was that you looked inside Windows. As I said, DRDOS was
closed. I imagine it would be a lot easier to prove with an open community
developing the product. OTOH, the Wine team might do this already.
Corel might have been doing it secretly.. that would have been the best way to
hide it, because whatever went on in Corel could have been closed, until they
released the RESULTS of their work, no word on how it was achieved ;-)
It would probably be a good idea, if you're serious about this, it ask the Wine
people if they would *accept* specs made in this manner.
One last point, there might be a clause in the EULA that forbids
reverse-engineering the product. In which case you would be obliged to destroy
all copies of the Windows you were using at the time, as your license would be
terminated and you would be using it illegally.
>
> Any ideas?
> -ws
>
>
--
JP Morris - aka DOUG the Eagle (Dragon) -=UDIC=- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fun things to do with the Ultima games http://www.it-he.org
Developing a U6/U7 clone http://fly.to/ire
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