Dan Kegel wrote: > We've gone over this about a dozen times. Can we get back to > programming Wine now (cleanly)? > - Dan > Here's the law as I know it. As far as I know, it is quite identical in the US and in Israel in that regard: - Any trade secret (say, algorithm, interface, subbehavior) loses its secret status the moment it is reversed engineered from a legally obtained copy. Once it loses its secret status, it is obviously legal to cleanly reimplemenet it. - Any trade secret loses its status the moment it is public. As far as I understand it, the MS source code that was leaked has no trade secret protection any more, and it is entirely legal for a Wine hacker to look at it in order to find out, for example, why a certain combination of parameters, when sent to a certain function, causes Windows to do something unexpected. It is NOT legal to copy code into Wine from it, as that code is still copyrighted. - Interfaces are not copy protectable. This means that it is, in principle, legal to copy a file that only has interface definitions (say, a header file) into Wine. We don't do it, and for a good reason (why risk it for such a small gain), but it is legal. - A programmer is only tainted if she signed an NDA or a non-compete. Even then, it's a contractual dispute, not a criminal dispute, whether she is allowed to work on Wine. Merely looking at publicly available code does not taint a programmer (this is unlike the IBM BIOS case, where they gave the BIOS source code under NDA, and thus retained trade secret status for it).
Shachar
