Skype Goes After Reverse-Engineering

[Prescience500]

the real "fix" would be for Google to drop their incompatible modification of XMPP and to use real XMPP. but they don't seem to be too keen to do so.
so, XMPP clients are bound to implement workarounds for it.

I thought Google did do that very recently. At least they did that with voice/video. Does anyone know more about this?

[Ex-Cyber]

AFAIK, the point of clean room is only to prevent the final product from infringing copyright; it has nothing to do with the reverse engineering itself being legal or illegal. The problem it solves is that if you clone a product, it's very likely that your clone will contain extremely similar or even identical code simply because some problems have obvious solutions. Thus a defense is needed against the accusation that you merely copied code instead of reverse-engineering it. Clean room provides this defense because the implementer of the clone couldn't have copied the original code if he was never allowed access to it.

[Ragas]

As it is in the free world in general.

And the USA obviously is not part of it.

[yogi_berra]

I don't know how 'ethical' enters the picture here as it is a legal matter.

Copying others work is just not ethical. It also happens to be illegal in this case or the lawyers wouldn't be involved with it.

This was done using clean-room reverse-engineering

You are comparing your experience with apples to his experience with oranges. There was nothing clean-room about epycs.

[RealNC]

As it is in the free world in general.

And the USA obviously is not part of it.

Well, you gotta admit that it tried very hard the last years not to be. See privacy and citizen rights crippling laws ("anti-terrorism" laws), censorship laws and the DMCA.

I hope the majority of the US citizens won't put up with that shit for much longer.

[yogi_berra]

Well, you gotta admit that it tried very hard the last years not to be. See privacy and citizen rights crippling laws ("anti-terrorism" laws), censorship laws and the DMCA.

I hope the majority of the US citizens won't put up with that shit for much longer.

Yes, we're so horribly oppressed here, police state and all that rot...

[AnonymousCoward]

Copying others work is just not ethical. It also happens to be illegal in this case or the lawyers wouldn't be involved with it.

Is forcing people to use only your program ethical?

[RealNC]

Yes, we're so horribly oppressed here, police state and all that rot...

It's mostly this stuff:

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/downloading-mom-fined-80000-per-song/

I never said you're a police state or anything like that.

[XorEaxEax]

Copying others work is just not ethical.

First off, reverse-engineering software is NOT copying, if you COPY someone's code then it's NOT reverse-engineering. If you analyze the mechanics of what someone's code does and re-implement that functionality then you are reverse-engineering, if one person does the analysis and another does the re-implementation then you are clean-room reverse-engineering. As for the legality of clean-room vs non-clean room that differs from country to country I reckon.

Ethics? I don't know, had not PC clones been legally allowed to reverse-engineer IBM's bios then they would have had monopoly on the PC market and the world of pc computing would have looked very much different. Microsoft reverse-engineered Novell Netware to make their network services compatible in order to compete, later Samba reverse-engineered Microsofts network protocols... the list goes on and on.

It also happens to be illegal in this case or the lawyers wouldn't be involved with it.

So lawyers involvement automatically means something is illegal? I'm sure we could find hundreds if not thousands of wrongly-issued DMCA takedown notices with some Google searching.

[Yfrwlf]

a) Microsoft = skype = assholes
b) stop using Skype, start using XMPP for everything