Re: Reverse engineering != piracy (was Re: RosAsm disassembler output vs. IDA Pro)

From: Beth (BethStone21_at_hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com)
Date: 01/27/04 

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 09:43:24 -0000

Gerhard W. Gruber wrote:
> I don't think that this is a good idea, but then again. That
approach would be
> VERY hard to apply to some commercial app anyway, as it takes quite
a lot of
> time to "reuse" a nice function from i.E. MS Word. I doubt that
anybody, who
> is in his right mind, will reverse engineer Word jsut to get a
function out of
> it. The amount of work involved is in no relation to the benefit you
gain, so
> this already makes the disassembling approach only usefull, as a
tool for
> reusing code, for apps where you already know the code quite well,
which
> limits it to your own code mostly.

Agreed; But Randy has a point to note that there is an _implication_
here in Rene's comments because if this is "own code" or other GPL
works then why do you not already possess the source code? GPL
guarantees that it must be available or it's a breach of
licence...it's possible that you could lose your own source code and
need to reverse engineer a binary to attempt to recover that source
code...but, then, wouldn't the advocacy of making better back-ups and
so forth be a much easier strategy to prevent such a situation
happening than creating a reverse engineering tool?

Indeed, Rene has NOT advocated illegal use but it's hard to appreciate
many circumstances where the need would be required regularly by any
legal use...with something like IDApro, it's a separate tool,
specifically designed - one would imagine - for the rare situation
where, indeed, you need to recover source code from a binary due to
loss or something like that...but it's an integral feature of RosAsm
and Rene _has_ implied _regular use_ of his reverse engineering
feature as part of ordinary development in his comments with the
suggestion that the reverse engineering facility _will_ make a drastic
impact to the effectiveness and productivity of the RosAsm user (if it
was used infrequently for the rare occasion of recovering lost source
code, how could it really be making anywhere near the "drastic
improvement" he has implied it will do?)...

These, to my mind, all seem very difficult to resolve with each other
from Rene's comments, without, indeed, arousing _suspicion_ about the
final "intended use"...hence, it may be buried somewhat deeply in
Rene's comments but I would suggest that it _has_ been implied, as the
entireity of his comments can't really be resolved in too many
different ways...

Although, of course, Rene is speaking a foreign language when he
speaks English and, therefore, it's quite possible that any such
implication was purely accidental and there's a quite reasonable,
legal explanation for it and I've simply misunderstood what he was
attempting to say...or, at least, that's what I can repeat in court,
is you like ;)

Beth :)

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