"You are probably looking for inaccuracies in my posts in order to undermine
my position, "
Not at all; I was only pointing out changes that I perceived. For example:
"Calling a law which applies to all eu countries local is inaccurate."
In your very first post you were not indicating any
region/jurisdiction-specific stuff. That didn't come in until later. That's
why I was mentioning the change from global to local. Mentioning this change
is important because I'm most familiar with stuff in the U.S., which is where
I live. And it is local because the EU is not the only region/jurisdiction in
the world.
And also when I said "some places of the world have rules regarding
interoperability", EU law procedure was not relevant because I was not
talking of the EU, although that statement may be true there too, but of the
world in general. Once again, the EU is not the only region/jurisdiction in
the world. I was still trying to keep the conversation more global but it
seems that won't be happening, so:
"Apparently in usa that has to be done by different persons for legal
reasons."
Reverse engineering doesn't necessarily have to be done by different people,
but it is the safest option.
Imagine if the person has access to a proprietary source code, studies it to
learn about the program, and then goes to make their own version of the
program. There is always the potential for similiarities between the programs
for various reasons. The person that did the reverse engineering may claim
that they are merely accidental; that the similiarites exist because there
aren't many ways for that functionality to exist. The developer of the
proprietary program may claim that the person merely copied the source code -
after they had access to the source code they'd claim.
If you can instead show that a process was in place that made copying of
source code impossible, because the person that wrote the new free code
worked only from documentation of how the program should work and/or from a
specification written by someone else that had seen the source code, but the
person doing the coding never saw the original source code, then any
similiarites that exist are very likely to be because there are very few ways
to implement that part and it's likely not copyrightable and makes for a
stronger defense in case the matter goes to court.
"In the video Stallman mentions, that people may turn over the specifications
anonymously. Why that other than it is a matter of illegal leaking?"
I don't think I understand the question here, but yes - there is the
potential for whoever is turning over the specifications to get into trouble,
as discussed earlier in the thread. An example situation might be someone
that works at a company that leaks the documentation to someone outside the
company. If the company were to learn that the leak happened they might then
try to find out how it happened. If they were able to find out who leaked the
information that person could then face charges.
"Reverse engineering is legal?"
It depends on the specific details of a situation. Some proprietary software
EULAs with terms saying you can't.
The EULA for Adbobe Flash said this, for example (or did; I don't know if it
still does or not but that's not relevant at this time.) The people that
originally started working on Gnash, for example, were looking for people
that had never used Adobe's Flash in order to avoid potential legal problems
stemming from this. If they'd never used the software they could never have
agreed to such terms. This is mentioned here -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash_(software)#Adobe_Flash_Player_End-User_License_Agreement
Of course, the next paragraph talks about whether such stuff is legal or not
in the EU. But the people that were working on Gnash, like Rob Savoye, were
in the U.S. and so U.S. law would have applied to them. What other laws might
have applied to them in some other theoretical alternate universe where they
lived in another country seems a tangential point. (And of course everything
I'm saying, like on the topic of reverse engineering, has a U.S. perspective
on it because that's where I live. You'll likely find differences in other
regions of the world; that doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong.)
