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by dgellow 2095 days ago
That would be really bad for these authors to download or look at leaked code. That's exactly how you get yourself in legal troubles.

That's why they have policies to not look at any leak, and even with this ReactOS and Wine already had their share of controversies in the past.
2 comments
etaioinshrdlu 2095 days ago
But realistically, how will they know if some random Wine contributor is "inspired" by leaked code?

It seems like it would just go undetected.

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dgellow 2095 days ago
Both ReactOS and Wine are open sourced, Microsoft engineers and lawyers look at their code. That's not a hypothetical situation, it happened in the past, the most recent news event on this was: https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_resea....

With the risk of copyright infringement you want to be sure that you're taking active measures to defend your position in case you're facing legal charges.

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saagarjha 2095 days ago
(Usually projects of this sort will make you guarantee that you have not been influenced by the closed-source code they are trying to clean room.)
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csharptwdec19 2095 days ago
Yeah, I actually once worked at a place that was clean-rooming. They went to absurd lengths, even WITHOUT the old source code.

If you were designing the new app you couldn't even -look- at the existing UI; you could only get descriptions. Every term was checked by legal to make sure that it was a 'standard' industry term vs something that was specific to the existing software. They even used a different tech stack wherever they could.

I think the other company still tried to sue, IDK how it played out (I was gone by then) but I remember at least thinking they were in a pretty safe spot with how they handled it.

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severino 2095 days ago
However, maybe having someone external to the project look into, and understand those undocumented functions or system calls, and explaining them to the people which will actually implement them could work.
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