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Comment by pawjs | Hacker News Reader

Taint yourself with illegal source code? What does that even mean?

Wine doesn't allow contributions from people that have seen the Windows source code[0]. I'm not sure of other projects with similar restrictions though.

[0]: https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...

Yes that seems very easy to enforce.

I bet 99% of Wine core developers have at least skimmed through the Windows 2000 leak at some point.

99%? Do you actually believe that?

Same with ReactOS, and they have experienced lawsuits because of someone trying to contribute leaked code.

How do they know if someone has seen the source code or not?

They do not. It is a honour code.

I did not expect this to be such a controversial point, but I am referring to the fact that even having seen the source code would make me a legal risk to employers and open source projects. Whether this is ridiculous or not is not my point, it’s the reality I live in.

Here's the thing though: suppose you have worked for some previous employer, and seen their proprietary codebase. By your logic, you'll never be able to work on anything else or for any other employer without being a legal risk to them.

I do not think the chances of me implementing something so similar to something I have read before such that it would constitute copyright infringement are very high. I usually can't even remember the exact way I wrote some piece of code months ago myself, let alone something I read...

The code I see from my employer is indeed a risk to my employer later on, but at least I'm seeing this code legally.

Whether or not this makes any sense, I don't know. I'm also not a lawyer, but I believe this principal is important for clean-room reverse engineering as well.

I'm also not a lawyer, I can indeed see it being prudent to not go looking at code you're not legally allowed to use related to what you're working on right now (I wouldn't do that). But I can't believe looking at any other code in general would "taint" you in some way.

And yes, clean room design is a bit more extreme in that regard (which is probably something companies/individuals do if they expect a high risk of litigation, as it probably makes it a lot easier to prove that there is no copyright infringement, and certainly not willful infringement)

So, the requirement for Wine and ReactOS mentioned in the other comments is probably not unreasonable.

There is a classic phrase to keep in mind with things like this: "don't ask, don't tell".

Look at the Google/Oracle case about their replicating of the Java API. There was significant debate over whether they made a clean room implementation or whether they just copied Oracle's code.

If you could stand up in a court room and truthfully say "I've never seen the source code I am accused of copying" it would be to your benefit.

It means that if you read the Win2k source code, any code you write could well be challenged as a copyright infringement.

This seems like a really silly point of view: it would be similar to saying that anyone ever reading a novel would not be able to write their own.

You might want to look up clean room engineering.

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