Preface: The "you" in this reply doesn't mean Todd Ashworth. ;)
As I mentioned in another post, copyright and reverse engineering law are
very different from ours in many parts of the world. In most cases it is
more lenient and does not prevent reverse engineering. This is not to be
mistaken with stealing source and calling it your own. I am amused by the
frequency with which postings to this thread have been peppered with the
word "ethics". It seems to me that in these cases "ethical" is used as a
stand-in for "legal in the US". The term that many have used liberally to
impose some sense of moral gravity on this issue is completely off base if
you're not in the US. Ethics is a set of moral principles or values. If you
live in a country where reverse engineering is legal then there is no moral
dilemma and a scale of ethical correctness doesn't apply. What you're asking
is, how unethical does an individual feel it is to break the law. I think
most would answer that it depends on the law in question. We've all sped on
the road, many over-value donations to get a tax break, and we've all picked
a quarter up off the ground without contemplating our inner righteousness. A
great example is gambling. It's illegal in most states, but in Nevada it
isn't, nor is it illegal if you're onboard a licensed vessel afloat on the
Mississippi River. Does this mean that all casino or gambling boat operators
are immoral and ethically corrupt? Of course not, even though what they do
is illegal in most parts of the country. If you live in a place where
gambling is illegal but travel to one where it isn't and gamble are you
acting immorally or unethically? Does traveling 5 feet into a river really
change what you're doing? No it doesn't. So ethics and morals seem to have
little to do with legal law even though they are sometimes the catalyst for
laws. If you feel that legality == morality then this line of reasoning
isn't for you.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Ashworth [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 8:11 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: Re: Need decryptor tag for CFUG presentation
There is a very grey line here .. maybe. Take this real life example:
We had a father/son team that worked for my company. The father was one of
the ones who helped start the company and greatly responisble for making it
successful durring its startup phase. As the company grew, the ideas about
how it should continue differed between one of the founders and the father.
The father eventually left on somewhat 'bad' terms. Soon after, his son
also left the company .. also on somewhat bad terms. The father joined a
company that made similar, but not competing products. Soon after, that
company decided to make a competing product. Luckily, the father knew the
industry, but not how the product was made. Unfortunately, the son worked
on the product itself and knew a fair bit about how it worked. The son had
some copies of the compiled code. He and a buddy managed to reverse
engineer it and (as far as we know), deliver the source code to the
competing company so they could "learn how the program worked". I'm sure
the intent was to learn how we did things and, ahem, build on those ideas.
Was this just leanring from another developer to learn how to dome something
better, or, was it plain code theft. Is there a difference in this case
(they were using a different language)?Luckily, they weren't too bright and
wasted time building a product for a market that was already at least 50%
saturated (a lot for market share among government agencies ;), so they
weren't much of a threat .. but still ....
Now .. most would certainly agree that this is just flat out wrong, ethicly
as well as legaly, but the grey area is .. how wrong is it, ethicly, to
reverse engineer a program to learn how another developer accomplished
something so that a particular way of doing things can be learned to build a
non competing product? What about just for personal knowledge?
It's starting to look like, it's just how you look at it ;)
Todd
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