[dgellow]

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.

[saagarjha]

(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.)

[csharptwdec19]

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.