On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 17:17 +0200, Julien HENRY wrote: > I have to > admit that many functions will be translation Windows > ASM->SANE C. > > Is this legal, and can I say my code is under GPL ?
Most likely not. In fact, I would neither do it nor advise anyone to accept such code into any project. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Computer_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design and links from there. In short: write a spec and have someone else implement it, but try to avoid just copying algorithms into the spec. johannes -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 832 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20050805/9cffeac3/attachment.pgp From [email protected] Fri Aug 5 17:03:06 2005 From: [email protected] (Jochen Eisinger) Date: Fri Aug 5 17:07:22 2005 Subject: [sane-devel] Is reverse engineering legal ? In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> References: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Hi, a third opinion... it is legal (in europe) to analyze (that is, not decompile) a program, for the purpose of developing a interoperable program (but not a competiting program). On the other hand, there are doubts that a cleanroom solution as Johannes suggested is legal, because it doesn't restrict what for you develop the program and how you obtain the information (e.g. you could decompile the program in the cleanroom and then write a competiting program). As for scanner drivers, I'd say it is safe to analyze the protocol and write a GPL'ed SANE backend for it, because you don't even look at the windows drivers code (so it's just analysis of the functionality), and the SANE driver does not really compete with a windows driver (it's just ment to ensure interoperability of the OS and the hardware). I'm no lawyer as well, just my 2 cents. Asking the company selling the scanner sometimes helps. In the best case, they provide you with information about the scanner, in the worst case they tell you whether they'd take legal steps against you or not :) In my experience, they silently ignore you, if they don't care whether there is a SANE driver or not. kind regards -- jochen
