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From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Reverse engineering, piracy, etc. (was GNUclear Warfare)
Message-ID: <RANG.89Dec17150615@derby.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 89 21:06:15 GMT
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In-reply-to: jb3o+@andrew.cmu.edu's message of 14 Dec 89 22:16:15 GMT

In article <4ZW1ijS00WBKE1qh5C@andrew.cmu.edu> jb3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jon Allen Boone) writes:
>In fact, some claim that this
>has been said "Write your own <smirk>"  Well, that~s what rms did - he
>didn~t like the actions that some group was taking, he had access to
>their stuff, he reversed engineered the software and viola - he had a
>version to use (or give away as i believe he did) and he didn~t have to
>put up with the other people bs.

  No, he did *not* reverse engineer the software.  Reverse engineering
means that you take somebody's software, figure out exactly how it
works, and write something which is implemented the same way (more or
less).  This is often illegal.  He simply wrote more-or-less
compatible replacements.

>If no one is interested in BIOS, then why does Phoenix claim that
>pirates are running them out of business?

  I don't know the details of this claim, but there are at least two
distinct reasons for piracy:  (1) to use software without paying for
it, or (2) to make money by selling other people's software.  I'm
willing to bet that #2 is the only reason people would bother to
pirate a BIOS implementation: so they could sell it more cheaply than
Phoenix (since the pirates don't have to pay back their development
costs).

>Now, the fact that *most* pirates are high-school kids

  Bad assumption.  Most pirates of game software may be high-school
kids.  Most pirates overall, though, are not: they're just average
computer users.  Corporations are bad at this.  The average school
pirates more software than all of the kids going to it.

>What you *can* say (and what i gather you are saying) is that given that
>MicroSoft hadn~t written Excel or Word, you sure-as-blue-blazes wouldn~t
>have either.

  If MicroSoft hadn't written Word, I suspect it would not have been
written for a LONG time.  I haven't got a steady enough source of
income to be able to spend 20 years writing, debugging, testing, and
writing manuals for a program like that.  Even if I got together with
10 other people and we wrote it in three years, there's no way I would
be willing to spend 3 years without any income for it.  I can't afford
to do that (not being independently wealthy).

  On the other hand, I can manage to spend 20-30 hours a week writing
programs if I expect to make some money from it.  I paid for three
years of college with money from commercial software I've written.  I
wouldn't have been able to spend much time on it if I were doing it
for free; I'd be working the 20-30 hours a week someplace where I
could make money.

  Sure, I write free software from time to time.  But I don't usually
spend the time to write user manuals, add in features which aren't
likely to be used by me or my friends, etc.

>Of course, you could alway says (with a tone of superiority) "well, if
>you want it, then reverse engineer it!"

  If you want it, and you're not willing to pay me for my time and
trouble, write it yourself--from scratch--since you obviously believe
that it wasn't any work for me to write it in the first place.

	Anton
   
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison |
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+