5 ms·

So you're just saying it's effectively illegal to reverse engineer pretty much anything. So long as the company in question put a magical paragraph of text in

by phil21 9y ago

So you're just saying it's effectively illegal to reverse engineer pretty much anything. So long as the company in question put a magical paragraph of text in their EULA? I just don't buy this. There is literally no way to build a CUDA clone without testing output against both your clone and CUDA itself. With this reading, EULA's have effectively banned cloning any form of software.

RhodesianHunter 9y ago
This is very similar to the dilema of drug manufacturers and generics to me. On one hand without a strong financial incentive you won't have big companies investing in the original pieces of software. On the other hand at a certain point it becomes a monopoly with a negative societal impact.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  Drug manufacturers get patents and a corresponding period of exclusivity. This is worse than patents in some ways because there's no time limit. It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation even after the relevant patents expire.
  - tossaway1 9y ago
    Copyright does have a time limit. In the US, I believe the work just had to be older than Steamboat Willie.
  - uxp 9y ago
    I don't buy this. "It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation _even after_ the relevant patents expire." You've gone from "Drug manufacturers get patents and a period of exclusivity" to "Patent and exclusivity, and also protection from generics for the brand's life", but patents can be applied for at any time during a drugs development, including before it's ever been synthesized (e.g., theoretical manufacture via computer models) but the exclusivity is only a U.S. FDA marketing feature. Patents on a drug could expire before the exclusivity, so a competing manufacturer could create a secondary brandname drug and sell it overseas during that period. I'm really confused as to where this EULA would even fit in, since you've just moved the goalposts with your "even after" clause. If the FDA had some kind of deterministic human trial of a drug, like some dystopian lab-grown identical human clones, of which drugs were trialled on and some company B was able to obtain a set of these clones from company A that had some kind of defect of which the drug was targeting as a cure or remedy for, and then used those proprietary clone models in order to test their clone drug against, we might have some kind of metaphor worth arguing against, but we don't.
- chc 9y ago
  It seems really weird to suggest that no big companies would make software if they knew that competing software could be developed. Regulations on drugs require extensive and time-consuming trials, and that's the strongest argument for drug patents. There isn't anything remotely similar in software, and that kind of incentive is definitely not needed.
tzs 9y ago
> There is literally no way to build a CUDA clone without testing output against both your clone and CUDA itself. Not necessarily. You might be able to get by only testing against third-party products that use CUDA. We did something like that at Interactive Systems Corporation in the '80s when we wrote a 286 Xenix emulator to run on 386 System V. If I am remembering correctly, we never actually had a 286 Xenix system to compare to. We just had a bunch of system call level test programs, and a few big applications like word processors.
- bri3d 9y ago
  Yes - I think clean reverse engineering is still possible in this model, but it really limits a lot of what software re-implementation people do day to day. For example, if I were making a spreadsheet application like Google Sheets, I'd have to build a repository of customer Excel documents and validate that my formula compiler output the same data as was present in the document, without ever opening Excel to quickly check an output or asking someone to open Excel and produce a spreadsheet containing specific inputs/outputs - because either one would be considered EULA-breaking reverse engineering (at least by my reading). That's scary and I actually think it has broader implications for "normal" products as less EULA concern is applied there than in obvious legal minefields like emulators.
  - sverhagen 9y ago
    I feel like "grandpa is gonna talk", and I'm not even that old. But "when I grew up", "reverse engineering" was still explained as an incredibly hard thing, infinitely harder than just engineering. It was said to be where one team would go into a room with a device, send out a spec, that a different team would then take to implement, they'd never meet, the implementing team would never get to see or touch the original device (pretty much what someone in a sibling thread described as their own experience, rather than me just hearing this being explained). With all that in mind, I'd say that WPL (the defendant) pretty much missed the whole point of reverse engineering...
    - rahimnathwani 9y ago
tlrobinson 9y ago
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

by phil21 9y ago

RhodesianHunter 9y ago

This is very similar to the dilema of drug manufacturers and generics to me. On one hand without a strong financial incentive you won't have big companies investing in the original pieces of software. On the other hand at a certain point it becomes a monopoly with a negative societal impact.

philipkglass 9y ago
Drug manufacturers get patents and a corresponding period of exclusivity. This is worse than patents in some ways because there's no time limit. It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation even after the relevant patents expire.
- tossaway1 9y ago
  Copyright does have a time limit. In the US, I believe the work just had to be older than Steamboat Willie.
- uxp 9y ago
  I don't buy this. "It's like drug manufacturers could attach a EULA to their pills that makes reverse-engineering a competing product a legally enforceable contract violation _even after_ the relevant patents expire." You've gone from "Drug manufacturers get patents and a period of exclusivity" to "Patent and exclusivity, and also protection from generics for the brand's life", but patents can be applied for at any time during a drugs development, including before it's ever been synthesized (e.g., theoretical manufacture via computer models) but the exclusivity is only a U.S. FDA marketing feature. Patents on a drug could expire before the exclusivity, so a competing manufacturer could create a secondary brandname drug and sell it overseas during that period. I'm really confused as to where this EULA would even fit in, since you've just moved the goalposts with your "even after" clause. If the FDA had some kind of deterministic human trial of a drug, like some dystopian lab-grown identical human clones, of which drugs were trialled on and some company B was able to obtain a set of these clones from company A that had some kind of defect of which the drug was targeting as a cure or remedy for, and then used those proprietary clone models in order to test their clone drug against, we might have some kind of metaphor worth arguing against, but we don't.
chc 9y ago
It seems really weird to suggest that no big companies would make software if they knew that competing software could be developed. Regulations on drugs require extensive and time-consuming trials, and that's the strongest argument for drug patents. There isn't anything remotely similar in software, and that kind of incentive is definitely not needed.

tzs 9y ago

> There is literally no way to build a CUDA clone without testing output against both your clone and CUDA itself. Not necessarily. You might be able to get by only testing against third-party products that use CUDA. We did something like that at Interactive Systems Corporation in the '80s when we wrote a 286 Xenix emulator to run on 386 System V. If I am remembering correctly, we never actually had a 286 Xenix system to compare to. We just had a bunch of system call level test programs, and a few big applications like word processors.

bri3d 9y ago
Yes - I think clean reverse engineering is still possible in this model, but it really limits a lot of what software re-implementation people do day to day. For example, if I were making a spreadsheet application like Google Sheets, I'd have to build a repository of customer Excel documents and validate that my formula compiler output the same data as was present in the document, without ever opening Excel to quickly check an output or asking someone to open Excel and produce a spreadsheet containing specific inputs/outputs - because either one would be considered EULA-breaking reverse engineering (at least by my reading). That's scary and I actually think it has broader implications for "normal" products as less EULA concern is applied there than in obvious legal minefields like emulators.
- sverhagen 9y ago
  I feel like "grandpa is gonna talk", and I'm not even that old. But "when I grew up", "reverse engineering" was still explained as an incredibly hard thing, infinitely harder than just engineering. It was said to be where one team would go into a room with a device, send out a spec, that a different team would then take to implement, they'd never meet, the implementing team would never get to see or touch the original device (pretty much what someone in a sibling thread described as their own experience, rather than me just hearing this being explained). With all that in mind, I'd say that WPL (the defendant) pretty much missed the whole point of reverse engineering...
  - rahimnathwani 9y ago

tlrobinson 9y ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design