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Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
Legal, yes; possible, no.
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No, it is possible, simply not practical due to the volunteer nature of the manpower involved in the OpenOffice project. If it was a for-profit venture, it'd be imminently practical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
My point is a bit more clear if you watch the relatively short talk by Lawrence Lesig, but in the past all creativity and technology was transparent. For example - and this is ripped directly from Lessig - one did not have to look at the patent to the cotton gin to find out how it worked, one could take apart the cotton gin and figure it out themselves. Likewise, I believe this should continue to apply to all creative works. Reverse-engineering should be legal across the board - not just with something like the APIs. Not to mention that the DMCA is working against even that.
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DMCA notwithstanding, reverse engineering *is* legal across the board. It is perfectly legal to buy a copy of any piece of software, disassemble/decompile/debug it completely and figure out exactly how every single piece of it works.
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Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
I have no problem with the fact many people choose Microsoft, but the sad state of copyrights makes it difficult for people to have much of a choice in the first place. If you read between the lines of what I'm saying, all software should be open source as all creativity in the past has been "open source" if you will, and the model of "open source" creativity in the past has proven to be the best in terms of innovation, progression, and rights of use. Minimal regulation should be given to creative works - to the extent of ONLY regulating production/publication - again, as it was in the past. To steal another popular point mentioned in the Lesig talk, copyright now is designed so that no one can do to Disney what Disney did to others. Well, I see nothing wrong with what Disney did to others and there should be a return to a society where that kind of free enterprise - building off the work of others - is completely legal and possible.
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So let me make sure I have your position correct. You would support governement regulation requiring all software publishers to publish human-readable source code for their products? Apart from being impossible to enforce, it seems incredibly counter to your anti-regulation stance on other issues.