Comment by transpute
1 year ago
> decompiling
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/101689/can-you-legal...
If you look at a decompiled code and are influenced in how you write your code by the decompiled code, this is probably a "derivative work" of the original program and not just "reverse engineering" from the way that the computer program works. Copyright for software protects the decompiled code that is written, as a literary work, and anything derived from that decompiled code is also protected..
[clean-room reverse engineering] One group examines the source to write the specs and rundown. Another to make the code again, with no people from group 1 taking to them but for the spec sheet
> do we need better tools to make it more practical?
Good question, perhaps others can comment. The challenge is likely economics, not tooling.
This is GPL code so decompiling isn't necessary or the problem.
Accepting over the wall low quality code and having a submitter for it who may know nothing about it makes it difficult to work any of this low quality code into the mainline kernel via its resource starved processes.