Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Dec 2006 19:58 UTC, submitted by Michael Larabel
"Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with Nvidia Corp and is an X.Org project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far."
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RE[4]: License violation?
by hal2k1 on Tue 26th Dec 2006 02:43
in reply to "RE[3]: License violation?"
Member since:2005-11-11
Exactly.
There are methods to monitor the behaviour of a piece of running code, and then try to replicate that behaviour with your own alternative code (ie clean room reverse-engineering), without ever disassembling the original code or copying it in any way (other than reproducing its behaviour in other equivalent code).
Rough example: I might learn calculus from someone's textbook, but that does not mean that if later in life I write a calculus textbook of my own from what I have learned overall that I necessarily violate the IP of the author of the book from which I first learned.
To violate a copyright, I have to actually copy the original book's text in substantial part.
Edited 2006-12-26 02:44
RE[4]: License violation?
by kaiwai on Tue 26th Dec 2006 03:15
in reply to "RE[3]: License violation?"
Member since:2005-07-06
RE[5]: License violation?
by raver31 on Tue 26th Dec 2006 08:58
in reply to "RE[4]: License violation?"
Member since:2005-07-06
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2006-10-09
In clean room reverse engineering, you only observe the effects of the software with which you are working. In this case, the Nouveau developers are monitoring the values in the registers on the graphics cards when certain calls get made. They're working off the observed effects of the program, not the program itself.
To put it in other terms, the developers are building a set of requirements that accurately describe the functionality of an existing piece of software, then they're building (from scratch) new software that fulfills the requirements. When all is said and done, you have two, provably distinct pieces of software that do the same thing.