On Sun, Aug 08, 1999 at 05:35:25PM -0230, James Oakley wrote:
"Timothy J. Massey" wrote:
Even if your BIOS bears no resemblance to the one you disassembled, because you *did* disassemble it, the makers of the BIOS you disassembled can say to you, "But you saw our code and did it yourself. That's illegal." And they'd be right.
Reverse engineering is very legal in Sweden, although it may soon be illegal in the USA. There wouldn't *be* any BIOS industry today if Phoenix hadn't reverse-engineered IBM's code.
So Phoenix, which now owns Award, is going to prosecute some college student in Sweden for doing exactly what they did. Not likely.
This is very true. A couple of years back, some guys who worked for Matrox quit and started their own video chipset company. Matrox successfully blocked their entry into the market because they saw proprietary Matrox engineering information.
Not the same thing. Those engineers had to sign stacks of non-disclosure and non-competition agreements before they could see Matrox's designs. They clearly violated those contracts.
Niklaus would be taking a bigger risk if he signed Intel's NDA. Right now, he has no legal obligation to protect anyone's secrets.
If a disgruntled chemist at Coca-Cola gave you their secret formula, he would be in deep trouble. But no one could stop you from selling cola drink (you couldn't *call* it "Coca-Cola", of course), or posting the formula on the web.
Dave Coffin 8/8/99 - To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@freiburg.linux.de with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message