[ptcampbell]

Wow. Do you have an example of this happening?

[djmips]

When Accolade Games reverse engineered the Sega Genesis (Megadrive) in the early nineties they employed the clean room technique with two groups of engineers. They went on to produce games for the Genesis without paying a royalty to Sega.

[royjacobs]

The BIOS used in the original Compaq machines is the classic example of this.

[comprev]

Exactly the example I was thinking of. It was a turning point for Microsoft in the David vs Goliath (IBM) story. Now their software could run on IBM-compatible hardware opening the floodgates for PC manufacturers

[CodeArtisan]

ReactOS, an implementation of Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

[nwellnhof]

Here's a recent HN post about Adobe Type 1 fonts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107659

[TLLtchvL8KZ]

I cant remember the name, but there was a GNU replacement for flash, I believe one of the rules to contributing was that you had not ever even used Adobe Flash before.

Back around 2007 I used it for a while, it mostly worked okay but always came across things it wouldn't work with and went crawling back.

[ce4]

Wasn't it called Gnash if i'm not mistaken?

[djmips]

The Phoenix BIOS example someone mentioned elsewhere. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2585652/reverse-engine...

[lillecarl]

I think this is kinda what the Wine project is doing.