RE: SWING at OJE

[Andrew Selkirk]

Hi,

>===== Original Message From "Nic Ferrier" <address@hidden> 
=====
>>Yes, reverse-engineering is permitted in most countries
>>with sane laws.  However, I don't think you can claim
>>that you're making a clean-room  implementation at the
>>same time, unless you're deploying some kind of
>>double-blind scheme.
>
>I don't think what Andrew's doing could be illegal in anyway. As far
>as I udnerstand it he's simple generating the stubs of the files from
>the public java docs.
>
>I'm not aware of any legal restriction of parsing text in copyrighted
>material.

Rolf is correct in my mis-use of the term clean-room I believe.
What I'm creating is an implementation of Swing, but not a 
clean-room version.  I've done some reading this afternoon and 
apparently, in order to properly create a clean room piece of 
software, you need one team who writes a specification on the
copyrightable elements of the existing software, and another team 
which writes the new version based on that specification.  Also, 
the implementation team must never had access to the original 
software; ie. if you every used Swing, you can't write a 
clean-room version (that is if, from this argument, that Swing 
is a copyrightable element).

Do I have this right?

Andrew...
address@hidden