About reverse engineering: In the old days, Compaq started making IBM clones after they had IBM's PCs reverse engineered by a third party company. They didn't reverse engineer it themselves to avoid liability. They just bought 'specifications' from that third party company which happened to be identical to the specifications of IBM's PCs--obviously by total coincidence. Nowadays this kind of joyriding doesn't hold anymore before a court of law, so forget about reverse engineering. And in this case it would basically be just the same as implementing their protocol which is already published anyway, so why would anyone bother to reverse engineer it? ;-)
If I were still using MySQL, I would migrate to Postgres before reverse engineering the protocol. But I find your take on this interesting. So much stuff historically has been reverse engineered legally that I would think a protocol would be hard to protect. (Consider WINE.) Of course I'm not a lawyer, and wouldn't risk my business on it.
On a side note, I bet a case could be made against Real Software for not publishing all of REALbasic Pro's code under GPL, since it comes with their open MySQL plugin and obviously links to it through the debugger. But since they've been warned by me years ago already and now again in this thread, I'm sure the folks at Real Software know what they do.
I've been wondering the same thing this entire time. Daniel L. Taylor Taylor Design Computer Consulting & Software Development [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.taylor-design.com _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
