Clean room design
A by means of cleanroom design and cleanroom design ( sometimes called Chinese wall technique) developed software copies the functions of an existing software without having to use the code of existing software (direct). The design is derived from the specifications of interfaces, file formats and protocols and verified by reverse engineering.
Description
The software created with the help of cleanroom design thus makes comparable as the original, but is completely independent of this. This is important because the copyright for software is in most countries, only the concrete implementation under protection, but not the functionality of a software. If you create a software so after the clean room design, the new software is free of copyright of the rights holder of the original.
An important reason for the generation of a clean-room implementation is next to historically developed software. The fact that such software at the beginning of the development was not necessarily clear how the end result would look like, ie has not developed in a linear out they often contain developmental weaknesses that can be retrospectively hardly correct. Such weaknesses may affect the runtime behavior as far as safety and speed. In a clean room implementation is in contrast tries to apply directly and rigorously to develop the already fully formulated ultimate aim towards.
A clean room implementation will only protect against claims arising from copyright. Other intellectual property rights, such as patent and trademark law can not be circumvented by a clean-room implementation. For this reason, even large software companies are increasingly put to a large repertoire of patents.
The programming of software from a recovered by reverse engineering documentation or specification is called clean room implementation. This specification extraction and re-programming must be performed by different people, according to American law interpretation, a dirty room team (reverse engineering) and a clean room team ( programmers ). The extracted documentation may optionally also be checked prior to use by a lawyer on copyright infringement.
Examples
A famous historical example is the first " IBM PC" -compatible clone of Columbia Data Products (MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer " ) which contained a cleanroom Nachimplementierung the IBM BIOS.
Another example of VTech clone is of " Apple II" ROM for the laser 128, the only clone of many who survived the legal recourse of Apple Computer.
Prominent examples of Cleanroom developments are found especially in the open source environment, because in this environment rarely appropriate license agreements can be made. Examples are Unix-like operating system Linux, the Windows-compatible runtime environment Wine or the GPL -licensed operating system ReactOS.