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:

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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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