A reverse-engineered description of Adobe Type 1 fonts. (1989)
minnie.tuhs.org
minnie.tuhs.org
It's 1989 or so, and Apple has an internal project doing outline fonts (led by Sampo Kaasila); fonts like these are the current publishing industry rocket science. John Scully drops by the group one day, sees how the they are progressing, and gets a demo. After the meeting, very soon after, he calls up the internal investment folks at Apple and tells them to sell all of Apple's stock in Adobe.
(There are some things that don't quite fit, but I still like the story).
One thing I did see personally see was an outline font package, written in C, that had about a 2K footprint in our project's ROM and worked really, really well, even on a 13 Mhz 68000 box with minimal memory. The guy who wrote that has been serially responsible for quite a few graphics library implementations over the last 30-40 years (and it's not all he does).
In any case I've coincidentally spent the week spelunking in the truetype spec; there are tons of old representations and font features that a robust font parser is still expected to support, and some of it is wonderfully arcane.
"One of our team members read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret."
Hopefully congress will step in if that happens. I’m not holding my breath though; it would immediately cement monopoly positions for any company big enough to afford lobbyists.
Maybe the big tech backlash crowd will suddenly become legally/technically literate and save us?
A finding not in favor of Oracle would call into question whether U.S. copyright law has any force at all. While software nerds may well be okay with this, people in literally every other field of creative endeavor -- art, music, literature, media -- may lose their shirts. And the hardest hit won't be Lady Gaga or other millionaires, it'll be the small time players.
There is no morally sensible universe in which the Supreme Court does not find for Oracle.
For clean-room design, you write down what the original does, not how it does it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design: “The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor”)
Having said that, the distinction between “what” and “how” can be somewhat blurry and the article also says they were “following the prevailing court decisions about how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret”, so maybe, it was more “what” than “how”.