In any case, it never had to turn petty, even if they really did feel like RE knowledge from Sandcastle was being used. Even if code wasn’t shared, knowledge could have been. I came out with the feeling that they had bigger concerns about optics above all, and they couldn’t use the same approaches that might’ve worked when they were the David and not the Goliath.
I don’t want to be the asshole dredging up drama needlessly, but the line just feels snide after all that happened. Like, if you wanted a slick logo, name and marketing page, you all could just make one; you had absolutely no trouble doing so for Project Sandcastle. I don’t see why this statement needs to be made here and now, as nobody would’ve batted an eye if they hadn’t said anything.
Emphasis on "wall" here. People who are being careful (and when your potential opponent is as big and powerful as Apple it's best to be careful) don't let the engineers who have seen the secrets talk directly to those who are doing the clean-room reimplementation. The first group documents what they found and how they found it, lawyers check the report for anything iffy, and if the implementers need to talk to the first group they don't do so directly, everything goes through legal.
But better to get legal advice on this than just listen to some random HN person (like me).
That interpretation of "clean room" is largely a myth in the context of open source reverse engineering projects. That level of rigour only really applies when you have companies directly opposed to each other, e.g. someone making unlicensed games for a game console by reverse engineering the DRM.
Clean-rooming is not a legal requirement to avoid copyright infingement; it's a legal defense against claims of copyright infringement.
In practice, the goal when doing open source projects like this, without a legal team to consult, is to use methods and approaches that yield a result similar to strict clean-room RE and result in an end product that is not a derivative work of the original code. The tricky thing here is that you need to be able to trust that the people doing the work knows how to do this safely.
Totally agreed, the pettiness in this case (if we're reading a one-off sentence fragment in a slide correctly) is unacceptable. I was just commenting that I don't see collaboration occurring for the well meaning base differences of opinion even once you unwrap away the pettiness.
I don’t want to be the asshole dredging up drama needlessly, but the line just feels snide after all that happened. Like, if you wanted a slick logo, name and marketing page, you all could just make one; you had absolutely no trouble doing so for Project Sandcastle. I don’t see why this statement needs to be made here and now, as nobody would’ve batted an eye if they hadn’t said anything.