Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.
See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup
That sounds difficult though. Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.
Ah the term I was looking for was “clean room”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup