> IBM was trying to do something similar, but Phoenix reverse engineered
> (first successful (in court) reverse engineering ever?) the
motherboard
> BIOS chip.
> That act began a chain of events that resulted in PCs as we know them.
> Have any of you wondered about the "reverse engineering" clause in so
> much of Windon't's software? I'm sure others here on newbie could
tell
> more of this and other things that led to the Free Software Foundation
> and eventually to Linux as we know it.
What Phoenix did was a stroke of genius at the time.
They got a group of people to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS, and from
that produce a 'data sheet' of what a BIOS chip should do.
They then got another group of people (who had to sign a document
swearing that they had never had any contact with the IBM chip, and
faced dire consequences if they had!) to read the data sheet, and write
their own BIOS based on that data sheet.
That was how they circumvented the copyright legalities on the IBM BIOS.
There was another such stunt pulled for PGP a few years ago. PGP was so
powerful that the US government classed it as munitions! Philip
Zimmerman (the author of PGP) was in and out of court for years.
Anyway, because of it's munitions classification, export outside of the
USA was illegal.
Now, due to the wording, it transpired that the ban only applied to
electronic copies. They were able to bypass these legal restrictions by
reverse engineering, printing out the source code (several thousand
pages), mailing this to a company in another country and getting them to
re-enter and recompile the code.
All good clean fun...
Regards,
Ozz.
