By prohibiting a clean-room rewrite you're skirting dangerously close to attempting to prohibit independent reinvention. That is, without hyperbole, one of the

By prohibiting a clean-room rewrite you're skirting dangerously close to attempting to prohibit independent reinvention. That is, without hyperbole, one of the most abhorrent ideas I've ever seen. Thankfully, software patents are unenforcable in most of the world and willfully ignored by large parts of it.