Developer is Efim Bushmanov, here an old interview about his first skupeopensource release: http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/05/ewdn-exclusive-an-interview-w...
Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
81–90 of 125 posts
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Europe, reverse engineering a protocol + building a commercial product on it, is legal. You cannot copyright a protocol or an API, if you built something merely by studying how it works.
The issue here is this appears likely to have been created by disassembly rather than pure study of behavior. Is that legal in Europe?
Disassembly by a team that results in new code written by the same team is not legal in any country that enforces copyrights. That includes the EU. Possibly excludes Russia and probably excludes China unless the owner is a large Chinese company.
In fact I'd be surprised if this code isn't taken off GitHub by a DCMA from Microsoft, as soon as it hits their lawyers' radars.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Russian", is not a race. We should find another word for this kind of prejudice.
There's the old and not as often used "stereotype". But it doesn't have the emotional impact like racist does, so... Anything that doesn't hit squarely at the pathos is right out.
> Anything that doesn't hit squarely at the pathos is right out.
Otherwise known as appeal to emotions. I think I'm going to start finding examples of avowed racists who criticize lynching so I can do the 'not all racists' thing.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
> One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. How is the first team compensated? or am I missing something? >This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers. Very interesting. Does anyone have a link to a write up on this? or at least have a place to start looking for info on it?
As much as I hate to just link to a wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Basically, you need to find developers with no experience at all with the technology (e.g. never used Skype before), and then get another set of developers to reverse engineer the product, and send the spec to the "naive" developers, for lack of a better term.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
> One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. How is the first team compensated? or am I missing something? >This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers. Very interesting. Does anyone have a link to a write up on this? or at least have a place to start looking for info on it?
Two teams in the same firm, as gruez says below. The key is that the second team does not look at the internals of the product, and that the two teams communicate only by specifications of interfaces (physical, software, electronic, etc.) and not of behavior.
This approach to cloning was established long ago (1960's) by IBM's competitors and has always been legal.
You can just google "clean room design", Wikipedia is quite informative on it.
BTW a few early PC firms did try to cut corners and clone the PC BIOS without the chinese wall; they were sued and died. This isn't theory; it's been practice for decades.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lawyers are paid to make cases. Here, it's quite simple. The author of this code saw the Skype code, indeed he admits it. Then he wrote new code. Same person. Your honor, it is unreasonable for him to claim that his new code was not heavily influenced by what he had seen. It is like me listening to a song and then writing a new one "heavily inspired by it", and then claiming I'm not committing copyright infringement.…
I have exploited several products that align closely with protocols and/or brand names used by large companies. For every single product, I have received a request to take down my product. And in every single case, after my (kickass, I must add) IP lawyer wrote them a reply, they went away.
What are you saying here, that you are good at skirting the law without breaking it, that all takedown claims are bogus, or that your lawyer is so good one letter can chase away even determined legal action by deep pocketed firms?
Only the first one makes sense, and it has no relevance to the project we're discussing, so it's unclear why you say it.
No disrespect, just trying to understand your point here.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I used this in a commercial product, it would be trivial (absolutely trivial) for the owner of the original product to take me to court for illegal distribution of their copyrighted works, based on the argument that the code I was distributing (for profit!) was written by someone who (by own admission in public) had reverse-engineered the original product. IANAL but I'd be willing to bet money on this. The only qu…
As long as you didn't use any of the original Skype code, you have nothing to fear (if you're based in Europe)
I made a quite clear explanation of the argument a lawyer would use. This open source client is in effect a pirate copy of the closed source client. I expect it will disappear from Github rather soon.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have exploited several products that align closely with protocols and/or brand names used by large companies. For every single product, I have received a request to take down my product. And in every single case, after my (kickass, I must add) IP lawyer wrote them a reply, they went away.
What are you saying here, that you are good at skirting the law without breaking it, that all takedown claims are bogus, or that your lawyer is so good one letter can chase away even determined legal action by deep pocketed firms? Only the first one makes sense, and it has no relevance to the project we're discussing, so it's unclear why you say it. No disrespect, just trying to understand your point here.
> No disrespect, just trying to understand your point here.
To me the point is pretty clear: Copyright law is also used for chilling effects on recalcitrant projects.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because I live in a country where people use copyright I live in a EU country where interoperability is a law yet is almost never respected, so I say, fuck copyright in that case. However, this is not the first successful reverse engineering of skype. Each time they broke compatibility with their next version.
As I said, people use copyright law to take other people to court, and then get money from them. Your "fuck copyright" statement is bold, and one I'd generally agree with, unfortunately it has zero relevance to the legal risks a business would take, using this code in a commercial product, in such a country.
As the author said, the files violating copyright are easy to replace. Let Skype ask for it, it will be 2 more days of work.
The reason why people want to see a clean room implementation is because they are afraid of patent and anticipate US-like silliness like Oracle claiming copyright on an API. Now that this is a very US-specific issue. If you don't plan to market to US, you can just ignore the issue.
I used to work for a French AR company. We were successful and at one point we planned to open offices in the US, but even without having done that, we already had received two frivolous claims by people based in the US (one who claimed he patented the idea of replaying the video at a varying speed). This delayed a bit our opening to the US and the first US employee was... a lawyer.
Do you realize that patents and copyright hell is the reason why, for more than a decade, VLC, a project made by French students, was better at playing videos than Microsoft's player, even when this was seen as crucial? Because France did not have to care for patent litigation.
Re: Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5
#90>> whether or not it is a clean-room reverse-engineered code, like Wine/ReactOS > No. Not clean room, not chinese wall. If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Also, offering commercial licensing? That's a good way to get a lot worse than just a DMCA takedown.
> If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. This is the law in the United States. From the links given in the readme file the authors are probably from Russia.
Copyright applies in Russia too. There are bits and pieces straight "reused" from other software - by his own admission.
So his claim that he is a sole copyright owner is patently false - this code could be trivially attacked as a derivative work. No sane person would touch it by a 10 foot pole.