Comment by wongarsu
5 months ago
Being completely untainted is the standard many reimplementations set for themselves to completely rule out legal trouble. For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it.
That is however stricter than what's actually legally necessary. It's just that the actual legal standard would require a court ruling to determine if you passed it, and everyone wants to avoid that. As a consequence there also aren't a lot of court cases to draw similarities to
> For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it.
I've heard this called in some circles "The curse of knowledge." The same thing applies to emulator developers, especially N64 developers (and now Nintendo emulator developers in general) after the Oman Archive and later Gigaleaks. There's an informal "If you read this, you can NEVER directly contribute to the development of that emulator, ever."
This comes to a head when a relatively unknown developer starts contributing oddly specific patches to an emulator.