> "Provenance" is tricky. For example, much of the knowledge of the Apple iWork formats were derived by reverse-engineering the source programs and extracting p

> "Provenance" is tricky. For example, much of the knowledge of the Apple iWork formats were derived by reverse-engineering the source programs and extracting protobuf definitions. Many open source projects have freely copied from each other, making detailed analysis tricky I wonder if the Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. ruling helps this in any way. Defining a specification (either with public docs, RE or empirically) of closed format for the sake of reading the data or long-term archival strikes me as emphatically free-use. But I could also easily seeing it ending up patent-troll bait.