Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I think they’re upset that the library was to be released under LGPL or whatever, even though they clearly went and read from it anyway when implementing their thing.

View on HN

It seems they're pretty directly admitting to referring to the LGPL library while implementing theirs under a different license.

I wonder if they'll have no issues with people directly reading their code while happening to implement the same functionality with a closed license? Or a GPL-style one?

I'm surprised they admitted to it - it's hardly "Clean Room"....

> I'm surprised they admitted to it - it's hardly "Clean Room"....

"Clean Room" RE isn't always legally required.

Not in RE, maybe, but directly viewing source isn't RE either.

> but directly viewing source isn't RE either.

I'd argue that it is. I'd also argue that directly viewing the source doesn't mean you can't write a non-infringing driver.

Unless the source is owned by Oracle, in which case, my hourly rate goes up 100x.

The source and the machine code generated from it are logically equivalent (hopefully). Legality and effort required may be a different matter, but from a common-sense point of view there's little difference.

Seems to me the most expectations they had with the library was about the compression stuff and it did not include that. So in the end it was mostly rev eng. Also in this specific case you are using the library code as documentation about the hardware, the code itself has little value. I doubt it would configure as license violation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com