[Mono-list] Ask Microsoft: Mono support

[Atsushi Eno]

Am not sure how American FTC says about it, but Japanese Fair Trade
Committee publicly reports that such license that tries to prohibit
reverse engineering is likely to be regarded as unfair practice
which is illegal in our antitrast law (no precedent as yet though).

(Of course RE is regarded as legal here in general too.)

It is not about RE, but as for prohibiting benchmark it is regarded
as invalid (New York vs. Network Associates).

Atsushi Eno

George Birbilis wrote:
>> Writing test programs and observing behavior is a form of reverse
>> engineering.  Period.  Fortunately reverse engineering is perfectly
>> legal, legally protected, and necessary for competition.
> 
> 
> well, we can agree on somewhat disagreeing on what reverse engineering is
> 
> indeed though, if your aim is to keep close compatibility with .NET 
> runtime, even if that contradicts its public specs (that is copy MS bugs 
> too), you'd need to do some reverse engineering
> 
> however, regarding the legality of reverse engineering, keep in mind 
> most software licenses don't allow it, so you can't even install such 
> software if you plan on reverse engineering it, else you break its 
> owners rights (cause they license it to you [even for free] under 
> certain end-user-license, not without any restrictions on its use)
> 
> when some s/w becomes ubiquitous though (aka Windows), it starts being 
> treated as common infrustructure and there are other laws coming in 
> play, anti-monopoly ones etc., thus you get the right to ask for more 
> published info on how that s/w behaves
> 
> -----
> George Birbilis (birbilis@kagi.com)
> http://www.kagi.com/birbilis
> --------------
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