Comment by simias
7 years ago
Are you arguing that MS mistakenly releasing a version of Windows with debug symbols didn't happen or that it constitutes a leak and isn't fair game?
Because the former is fairly well documented and the latter doesn't seem right in the context of this discussion. If MS themselves messed up and published the symbols through an official channel that's fair game IMO. Although obviously IANAL etc... I'm talking from an ethical perspective, not a legal one.
I don't know much about ReactOS or the NT kernel but we have this type of controversy regularly in the emulation scene and while sometimes it's true that people reuse docs they shouldn't have, a lot of the time people underestimate the skill and cunning of reverse-engineers to figure out how things work without having access to any restricted information.
Kind of late to the game here, but MS could ship actual source code and copying that code would still be copyright infringement. Reverse engineering for inter-operability is legal in many places, but copying implementations is not. Even having seen the code, you would have to reimplement it in a way that worked equivalently, but was different. The OP is claiming that even things like macros have the same implementation and names (i.e. code that is never exposed publicly in any way). Even if you could deduce this from debug symbols (which would be quite tricky, but probably not impossible), you've got to find another way to do that work.
I don't really subscribe to a belief of absolute morality, but in the context of the discussion, I think that no matter how you got access to that code, if you say that you are reverse engineering it, then copying an implementation is not doing what you are saying you are doing (as well as being copyright infringement).
> Are you arguing that MS mistakenly releasing a version of Windows with debug symbols didn't happen or that it constitutes a leak and isn't fair game?
I think he's saying that even having access to leaked or accidentally released originals is not implicit permission to use it freely. Otherwise any piece of software that was ever legitimately released would be fair game, just throw it at a decompiler and profit.
If you're making a clean room design having so many similarities to the original is unlikely to happen accidentally.
Anybody implementing a clean room design should theoretically have no prior knowledge of the original's inner workings. The specs are written by one person, checked to not include any of the original material by a second one, before being passed to a third to be implemented.
From far enough a piece of wire and an isolation transformer do the same thing. The secret sauce is in that isolation, you can't just shunt it and pretend it's the same.