peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (04/10/90)
Everyone is rushing around flaming about the "no reverse engineering" part
of the proposal, which seems to me to be just codification of existing
practice, but ignoring the far more damaging part of the proposal.
The ability to copyright program interfaces to packages takes the already
dubious "look-n-feel" copyrights to a new and absurd height. It's been
long accepted that it's OK to treat a package as a black box and figure
out what it does by poking it with numbers. Actually going in and
decompiling it, on the other hand, is a grey area. Some places set
up software "clean rooms" where programmers known to have no knowledge
of the competing product's internals do the clone, just to avoid even
the appearance of piracy.
This sort of thing started to fall apart with the look-n-feel suits, but
it's still OK to figure out the internals, document interfaces, and so on.
Nobody can keep you from writing an O/S that duplicates the UNIX system
calls.
Am I the only one disturbed by this part of the proposal?
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