Comment by MBCook
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
Wouldn't B's publication of the information make it by definition no longer a trade secret? It is now public knowledge, regardless of whether the current or former engineers might be liable for the original leak.
Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.
2 replies →
So what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own? There are countries in the global south that never had an industrial revolution and don't speak English and never had factories for export nor made anything in a factory industrially that isn't building material and food and maybe fuel for local consumption so they've never had an IP infringement case
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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
Exactly! That’s why companies create a clone every time they hire someone, put a clone into vat, and upon person quitting, the person is disposed of and the clone is sent to his family to take upon his role, without leaking company’s internal knowledge.
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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?