law is big and as complex as humanity because its how societies operate, can you do some research on your concerns, theres a lot of amazing nuances and everyone can benefit from grounding concerns against applicable statutes and case law so we can be more precise?

eg reverse engineering … at the compatibility level rather than code theft level is like the definition of fair use. otherwise implementing a reader writer for a custom commercial file format would actually be illegal instead of prtected

some wonderful examples include wine/reactos for windows os stuff, and haiku for beos. and literally as mentioned before: google v oracle is literally about when is compatible imples fsir use for jvm vs dalvik on android

On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 1:50 PM Jaro Reinders via ghc-devs <ghc-devs@haskell.org> wrote:

Also, we can consider a case much closer to software: reverse engineering.
Sometimes reverse engineering is done through the elaborate clean-room process.
Why would people do that if just changing the language (so not using assembly,
I guess) would be enough to avoid copyright problems?

On 9/1/26 19:41, Jaro Reinders 'j.s.reinders at posteo.net' wrote:
>> building dimilar code for a similar task in a
>> different language is definitely not infringing unless its also copying all
>> the text from the source application like some sort of text rpg.
> What if we compare this to literature? Surely a translation of a book into
> another language is still considered a derivative work, even if it reuses none
> of the “literal text”.
>
>

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