[sane-devel] Is reverse engineering legal ?

[Johannes Berg]

On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 17:17 +0200, Julien HENRY wrote:

> I have to
> admit that many functions will be translation Windows
> ASM->SANE C.
> 
> Is this legal, and can I say my code is under GPL ?

Most likely not. In fact, I would neither do it nor advise anyone to
accept such code into any project. 

Cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Computer_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
and links from there.

In short: write a spec and have someone else implement it, but try to
avoid just copying algorithms into the spec.

johannes
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