The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work.
This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].
It’s taint. Anyone who looks at it can’t work on a real open source driver because they will have had access to information they’re not supposed to.
It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.
Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?
"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?"
Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.
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That’s the most abstract and esoteric argument I’ve ever heard I think
The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work.
This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].
[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
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Wasn’t that exactly the legal standard Compaq had to prove when they did a clean room implementation of the IBM BIOS?