Reverse Engineering and Derived Works in Open Source Licenses?

[James Michael DuPont]

I am just reading up on the relationship between reverse engineering
and  derived works. 

This article seems to apply to all open source licenses, not just the
GPL. 

www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/linux/gpl-ucc2b.html

Does anyone care to comment?

mike

www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/linux/gpl-ucc2b.html
[[
It appears that the General Public License's restrictions on derived
works can be circumvented if one is able to reverse-engineer a piece of
GPL'd software (that is, without consulting the source code). 

UCC Article 2B's stance seems to be that reverse-engineering would be
an infringement of a license (which otherwise prohibits
reverse-engineering) only if the property rights (e.g., copyright) were
actually violated in order to reverse engineer --- for example, if a
copy of the code were made in order to disassemble it. 

Since the GPL places no restriction on activities such as these, it may
be the case that GPL'd code can be reverse-engineered and a new work
created based on the technology within the GPL'd code, which the GPL
itself does not cover. Article 2B specifically does not address this
issue which could raise problems for GPL'd software in particular. The
GPL is based on the assumption that any derived work based on GPL'd
software must make use of the source code, which is not necessarily
true.
]]

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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