[License-discuss] [FTF-Legal] Reverse Engineering and Open Source Licenses

Lawrence Rosen lrosen at rosenlaw.com
Fri Mar 6 17:09:06 UTC 2015


Nigel and others,

We needn't rely on some DT document to justify our reverse engineering. Here
is what EFF says we can do in the United States:

    https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq 

Perhaps we can rely on their well-researched legal analysis for now. Someone
complained to me that that this EFF analysis is U.S.-centric and ignores the
copyright law in other countries. But if one (legally and effectively!) does
reverse engineering in the U.S. and then distributes the results around the
world via an open source license, won't that be legal enough?

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Tzeng, Nigel H. [mailto:Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu] 
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2015 8:29 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [FTF-Legal] Reverse Engineering and Open
Source Licenses

Well, the provided text in the document does not appear to me to be
conclusive that permitting reverse engineering is not required from LGPL
users.  There¹s interesting analysis of the wording but the real ³missing
step² for me would be that your analysis would actually hold up in a court
of law.  Dependence on analysis of the ³logical structure of the sentence²
seems mildly problematic to me.

If this mattered significantly to me (reverse engineering) I¹d simply assert
that using Apache and BSD/MIT licensed code is just better and to continue
to avoid LGPL.  Which is what companies do and will likely continue to do
until there is supporting case law in the jurisdictions that matter to them
(US, EU, China, etc) that this isn¹t actually required for what they wish to
do with such libraries.  That would be the most prudent and conservative
course.  So Mr. Tilly isn¹t obstructing anything.

Now if DT were to offer indemnification for any losses incurred based on
your analysis...



On 3/6/15, 4:09 AM, "Reincke, Karsten" <k.reincke at telekom.de> wrote:

>Dear Mr. Tilly;
>
>On a first glance, your mail seems to be clear an reasonable.
>Unfortunately you are impeding the everyday work of those who want and 
>must convince and support their companies, employees and colleagues to 
>use free software compliantly. Let me explain, how your obstruction 
>comes into being...
>
>Sincerely
>Karsten Reincke
>
>--
>Deutsche Telekom Technik GmbH  / Infrastructure Cloud Karsten Reincke, 
>PMP®, Senior Experte Key Projekte - Open Stack
>Komplexitäts- und Compliancemanagement
>[ komplette Signatur einblenden:
>http://opensource.telekom.net/kreincke/kr-dtag-sign-de.txt ]
>
>_______________________________________________
>License-discuss mailing list
>License-discuss at opensource.org
>http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss

_______________________________________________
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss at opensource.org
http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss




More information about the License-discuss mailing list