[cafeinux]

I am sure big software companies wouldn't agree on this: decompile Excel or Photoshop and copyright the resulting code, and you shall get a nice lawsuit within days, if not hours. However, I guess there would have a bit of ToS breach, a pinch of DMCA and a lot of copyright infringement for reverse-engineering the software, maybe not that much for copyrighting the decompiled code.

[hellotomyrars]

They won’t agree and would file suit but legally this isn’t a highly tested area. The closest we get is Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. as far as I’m aware and that can be seen as more of a win for the reverse engineering than Sony. The particulars are but different to be sure though.

Realistically it unlikely that anyone would attempt to decompile and fully reverse engineer excel and attempt to package it as a product that they own. It just doesn’t make sense practically. But throwing something in Jira isn’t the same thing as actually putting in the work to reverse engineer it and make it effectively a perfect replication. You don’t unbake the cake, you can’t. You just figure out a process to end up with the same cake.

As for TOS goes, that’s its own other legal issue that has a mixed history erring on the side of TOS not actually being enforceable.

The people who did this work I think are fine to ask people to respect their license. They don’t have to worry about the US/Israel knocking at the door to tell them they can’t claim ownership anyways.