[MPlayer-users] QT Cinepak Decoding

[Mike Melanson]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2001, Attila Kinali wrote:

> > 	Just as a thought experiment, can you think of any reason to
> > reverse engineer something other than for the purposes of
> > interoperability, particularly when applied to computer code?
> 
> Yes, to make a competitory product. As I understood the

	I've had this argument with other people before and I must
maintain that a competing product in this case would still be
interoperable. So you would still be reverse engineering for
interoperability, even though it's also competitive.

	As an aside, I've heard that some companies, such as IBM, refer to
it not as "reverse engineering", but "competitive analysis"...:)

	So what would you think in this case? If someone were to reverse
engineer codecs for inclusion into the MPlayer codebase, would that be
reverse engineering for interoperability or competition?

> Sure it is :-)
> Sam (one of the authors of vlc) came to switzerland to write libdvdcss.
> 
> License tourism isnt uncommon :-)

	Are you serious? So, for example, a US citizen, equipped with a
laptop, could travel to Switzerland and spend a few weeks reverse
engineering binary modules and writing interoperable open source
implementations, and not worry about legal repercussions on arrival back
home? It sounds a little far-fetched...:)

-- 
	-Mike Melanson