Reverse engineering

Karl Hammar karl at kalle.csb.ki.se
Tue May 20 05:54:01 CEST 2003


> Is it legal to disassemble the proprietary VGA BIOS to learn how to
> enable a particular VGA chip?
> Of course, he (who?) will not copy any bits from the copyrighted code,
> he'll just pick up register addresses and values, and its order.
> If he would eventually write a code to enable VGA this way,
> can we share the resulting code?
> 
> --
> Takeshi

A FreeBSD developer said that in the EU there is a law that says that
you have the right to get the interface specifications.
I don't know if he was right or wrong. Even if he is right, there
could be conditions that makes it out of the reach anyhow.

Regards,
/Karl

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