Maybe I’m wrong, but wasn’t there a way to release this while avoiding the issue of copyright? My understanding is that publishing “clean-room” reverse engineered code is legal. The graphics and sound can’t be redistributed, but you can distribute a tool to rip those assests from a ROM and let the users provide a ROM they own. This is what Ship of Harkinian does no?
Thats my understanding of what happened here. The code is even included in this port. So everything was written from the ground up. I haven’t had a chance to actually compile it yet, but it looks solid.
I think the binary they distributed still included the art and sound assets; the users didn’t have to provide their own. And “clean-room” design is more than just providing source code. You need to provide a “paper trial” / commit history and documentation of how the final code was derived from the original code. My mistake, clean room is when you recreate the project without reading the original/compiled code at all. Specifications are written based on observed behaviors of the original user-facing program and new code is written according to that.
Can you really not read any of the compiled code tho? Like if I take the binary, put it in ghidra and use that to reverse engineer something, is that not clean room still?
I remember watching Halt and Catch fire where they had 1 group writing specs for what he REed and another group would write that code according to spec.
I thought decompiling with Ghidra was okay too, I may have just misunderstood the wiki article when I double checked post-commenting and crossed out my comment. I’m not entirely sure what comprises “proprietary techniques”. But I’m pretty sure that documentation needs to be provided in order to keep it on the legal side. Hopefully this project can come back and recieve continued support ala similar decomp projects.
It also doesn’t matter how by-the-law they do that if they’re still using trademarked terms so will easily show up as a search result when someone at a corporation has an intern run a script to do another batch of DMCA takedowns.
I mean unless they have the willingness+time+money to fight a highly-paid team of lawyers in court. (which could happen either way, but it’s much more likely when it’s so easy to find even if it gets 3 downloads)
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Maybe I’m wrong, but wasn’t there a way to release this while avoiding the issue of copyright? My understanding is that publishing “clean-room” reverse engineered code is legal. The graphics and sound can’t be redistributed, but you can distribute a tool to rip those assests from a ROM and let the users provide a ROM they own. This is what Ship of Harkinian does no?
Thats my understanding of what happened here. The code is even included in this port. So everything was written from the ground up. I haven’t had a chance to actually compile it yet, but it looks solid.
I think the binary they distributed still included the art and sound assets; the users didn’t have to provide their own. And “clean-room” design is more than just providing source code.
You need to provide a “paper trial” / commit history and documentation of how the final code was derived from the original code.My mistake, clean room is when you recreate the project without reading the original/compiled code at all. Specifications are written based on observed behaviors of the original user-facing program and new code is written according to that.Can you really not read any of the compiled code tho? Like if I take the binary, put it in ghidra and use that to reverse engineer something, is that not clean room still?
I remember watching Halt and Catch fire where they had 1 group writing specs for what he REed and another group would write that code according to spec.
I thought decompiling with Ghidra was okay too, I may have just misunderstood the wiki article when I double checked post-commenting and crossed out my comment. I’m not entirely sure what comprises “proprietary techniques”. But I’m pretty sure that documentation needs to be provided in order to keep it on the legal side. Hopefully this project can come back and recieve continued support ala similar decomp projects.
It also doesn’t matter how by-the-law they do that if they’re still using trademarked terms so will easily show up as a search result when someone at a corporation has an intern run a script to do another batch of DMCA takedowns.
I mean unless they have the willingness+time+money to fight a highly-paid team of lawyers in court. (which could happen either way, but it’s much more likely when it’s so easy to find even if it gets 3 downloads)