[License-discuss] Reverse Engineering and Open Source Licenses

[David Woolley]

On 04/03/15 15:16, Reincke, Karsten wrote:
>
> In the past I was involved in some full discussions concerning the issue
> ‘reverse engineering and open source licenses’. Although personally
> esteeming and inspiring, such discussions sometimes became a bit
> explosive: If – at least – the LGPL-v2 indeed requires to allow the
> reverse engineering of those programs which use LGPL-v2 licensed
> components, then companies are not able to protect these ‘private’
> programs against revealing the embedded business relevant secrets, even
> if they do not distribute the corresponding source code. And – as far as
> I know – at least some companies have therefore forbidden to link
> essential programs against the LGPL-v2.

 From my lay point of view, this appears to be under very limited 
conditions. My gut feeling is that the fact that you are in the EEC 
means that recipients have more rights to reverse engineer under EU law 
than they have under the terms of this licence, and both are trying to 
achieve similar aims, which is to allow third party code to interface 
with the software.

>
> I have taken the view that this ‘rule of reverse engineering’ cannot be
> applied  in case of distributing dynamically linkable programs. By
> arguing that way,  I caused astonishment and dissents. But often, I was

The status of dynamically linked programs is a hot topic in the open 
source community.  The Free Software Foundation, who created the GPL, 
essentially takes the view that dynamic linking has the same copyright 
status as static linking.  A number of frequent posters on this list 
disagree with that interpretation.