RE has always been "fair use" since the very early days. Look at the books and other work published by Andrew Schulman, Matt Pietrek, Mark Russinovich, etc. AFA

RE has always been "fair use" since the very early days. Look at the books and other work published by Andrew Schulman, Matt Pietrek, Mark Russinovich, etc. AFAIK no one has gotten unwanted legal attention from MS from it (and look at what happened to that last person...), and it's only when you want to be a competitor, like ReactOS/WINE, that they start paying attention. Also notable is that Ilfak Guilfanov (IDA author) published a free patch for the infamous WMF RCE before MS did.