OpenKore is now illegal

[Technology]

Comparing pot to reverse engineering, wow.

The thing is, companies already rip off eachother because an idea is only safe when its inside someones head.
There are different ways to do reverse engineering and i do understand that some are more illegal than others.
Also the reason why matters, if it were for commercial purpose, that'd be different.
Regulation is neccesary, in some cases.

If there was no reverse engineering, then there would be no concurrence at all.
And i tend to believe that concurrence leads to better advantages for the customer.
Imagine there being only 1 operating system that has almost full monopoly, it would suck. (no, this is not a joke )

And yea, no one in a position to change the law sees anything wrong with it.

[sli]

I think you completely missed my point, and I'm sure everyone else got it. Just because reverse engineering is as old as humanity doesn't make it legal. I gave a similar example, please try and keep up. The problem with regulating reverse engineering is that it's hard to prove that it's happened (but has been proven many, many times). People can create out of nothing, just look on Sourceforge and Freshmeat. You'll find full working operating systems based on absolutely nothing but what was in the author's head. And bonus: they're not Linux.

Most cases of reverse engineering (ie, every performance car part EVER) end up not being direct copies. That's the thing. Performance car parts are much, much better than the stockers (usually) and therefore aren't technically derivative. In the real world, only reversing imaginary property causes any problems, and even then it doesn't actually happen as often as you seem to think. There was a big burst of it (Windows 1, Linux, various BSDs, BeOS was probably in there, too) then it pretty much dropped of because of IP law.

[Technology]

Sli, if you think that i'm missing your point, then you are obviously missing mine.
Lets get one thing straight, my point was not that its legal because it has been around for ages.
The argument was that reverse engineering is a much wider aspect than most would imagine.
For instance, all operating systems today are based on the good idea's that people had in the past.
You don't especially need to go trough assembly code or do other tampering to acknowledge these idea's.
Once an idea is out there, others will copy it or even improve it, wich is good.
Oh the hypocrisy, Bill Gates based his operating system on source code that he found in a trashbin!
There is no way someone can write a competing os from scratch without knowing the other os'es functionalities.
That however does not mean that you need the source, but it helps.
Thus i was saying there are different ways to reverse engineer. Some more illegal than others.

[Bibian]

Pot is legal here too >_>

[sli]

Sli, if you think that i'm missing your point, then you are obviously missing mine.
Lets get one thing straight, my point was not that its legal because it has been around for ages.

Sorry. Your point was such an obvious and trivial one that it must have obliterated what I expected out of a discussion like this.

There is no way someone can write a competing os from scratch without knowing the other os'es functionalities.

This is not reverse engineering. Not only is it not, it's not even close to reverse engineering. But not all operating systems are based on another, as you can plainly see (another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another,and hell, one more), and some of them are.

[Technology]

Reverse engineering
The process of duplicating or enhancing a design by analyzing a final product on its structure, function and operation.

For instance...
When there was no operating system, the operator had to do all the actions by himself.
Mankind then invented the operating system, that would do this tasks for him.
It was a good idea, and good idea's get copied.
All next operating systems are improved copies of the first one.
And some even got same functionalities, hmm?
You might not call this reverse engineering, but I and allot of others do.

I won't go into discussion any further, its pointless.
Its all a matter of perception and interpretation...

[sli]

And some even got same functionalities, hmm?
You might not call this reverse engineering, but I and allot of others do.

You and "a lot of others" are completely wrong. So UNIX allowed you to copy one file to another location. So can just about every other operating system. That's not reverse engineering, that's simply implementation of a much needed utility. Imagine an OS that doesn't let you copy or move files. That's not a great example because the cp program is not part of the kernel, usually, but you get the idea. Reverse engineering, by definition, implies that you had to actually perform an act of reversing the original creation process. It's called reverse engineering for fucks sake, not "taking a good or useful idea and reimplementing it." It is literally the reverse of the engineering process.

There is so much information around on operating system development. The information had to come from somewhere. Learning and using this information is engineering, not reverse engineering. The information didn't come from tearing apart an already existing OS, it came from people who have created an entire OS from scratch. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that most of Linux was not ripped from UNIX. It was simply emulating the most powerful, stable OS at the time (still is, actually, since Novell's OS dropped off the face of the earth and was replaced by SuSE).

[h4rry84]

IT law in Indonesia was like shit already >_>

[sli]

Tech laws almost everywhere are retarded because no government knows anything about technology. Bleh.

[Krai]

can you sue an opensource community?