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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, inf
by 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 agoThat's 'clean room' reverse engineering. Not all reverse engineering has to be like that.
- mjevans 9y agoBased on the descriptions in the article, aside from isolating the teams, this is very much what they did. The difference being that they didn't have a second team dis-assemble and actually reverse engineer the product to write a formal spec for how it functioned. Instead they did A/B testing to ensure that the output of the known product produced the same output as the reference implementation, reportedly without examining how the black box worked.
- bri3d 9y agoYes - this was the point I was making in the last sentence of my comment. People writing things like emulators think about "reverse engineering" and take clean-room precautions. People writing things like spreadsheets think about "what does the competitor product do" and "competitive analysis" and type things into competing products and observe the output, which by my reading would be an EULA breach as well.