Clean-room reverse engineering

Posted Oct 3, 2025 8:07 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by ballombe
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

Clean-room reverse engineering is a whole different topic though, isn't it? It's what Compaq did back in the 80's to reverse engineer the IBM PC's BIOS, enabling them to make compatible machines in a legal way. Notably the people who studied IBM's BIOS and the ones who implemented Compaq's new one were different teams, to avoid any copyright issues.

That's a whole different situation than either people or LLMs reading code and later using their knowledge to write new code.