Is decompilation legal?

[Dave Mitchell]

I have read of software companies accused of stealing or lawfully obtaining disassembled code, hiring a group of new programmers (new to that company), who have never seen the code in question, and giving them the job of coding up functions that meet certain criteria. Then, using the best of what that team produces, since it now is legally "clean" code.

[msalzge]

This is reminiscent of the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit where SCO claimed that some of their proprietary code was integrated into early versions of Linux.

As far a disassembling the code, Vas is right. Compilation of computer code is, by its nature, a destructive (or "entropy-increasing") process. It would be easier to extract an egg from a (homemade) chocolate cake than it would be to steal useful algorithms out of an exe. Far easier is to steal ideas and observations about how the code operates, and emulate that using new code.

[Bo Persson]

I have read of software companies accused of stealing or lawfully obtaining disassembled code, hiring a group of new programmers (new to that company), who have never seen the code in question, and giving them the job of coding up functions that meet certain criteria. Then, using the best of what that team produces, since it now is legally "clean" code.

I guess the original story is about companies cloning the IBM PC BIOS. Here you didn't have to disassemble anything, because the code was written in assembly.

IBM also made it a lot easier by publishing the code in their Technical Reference Manual. That way "lawfully obtaining" the code wasn't too tricky!