| ▲ | sa1 4 hours ago | |
But clean room reverse engineered code can have its own license, no? | ||
| ▲ | vunderba 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
In fact, the story of how Atari tried to circumvent the lockout chip on the original NES is a good example of this. They had gotten surprisingly close to a complete decompilation, but then they tried to request a copy of the source code from the copyright office citing that they needed it as a result of ongoing unrelated litigation with Nintendo. Later on this killed them in court. | ||
| ▲ | simonw 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
Yeah, I think it can. I'm reminded of the thing in the 80s when Compaq reverse engineered and reimplemented the IBM BIOS by having one team decompile it and write a spec which they handed to a separate team who built a new implementation based on the spec. I expect that for games the more important piece will be the art assets - like how the Quake game engine was open source but you still needed to buy a copy of the game in order to use the textures. | ||