How legal is AROS ?
Last Update: 30.03.2003 Well, European law says “To gain interoperability, it is legal to apply reverse engineering techniques. It is illegal to distribute the knowledge gained by such techiques”. So what does that mean ? It means basically that you are allowed to disassemble or resource any software to write something which is compatible (ie. it would be legal to disassemble Word to write a program which converts Word into ASCII text). Now there are of course limitations: You are not allowed to disassemble a software if the information you would gain by this process can be obtained by other means and it can be expected that one would use this is other means. And you must not tell others what you learned. A book like “Windows inside” is therefore illegal or at least dubious. Since we avoid disassembling techniques (hey, we want the spirit and not the bugs) but use common available knowledge (including programming manuals) which don’t fall below the NDA, this doesn’t apply directly to A
