Re: [freesci-develop] Proposal for new direction of the project

[Christoph Reichenbach]

Jordi,

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 08:53:40AM +0000, Jordi Vilalta wrote:
> >  Before you incorporate any code into FreeSCI, please make sure that it
> >wasn't derived from illegal reverse engineering.  FreeSCI is a clean-room
> >re-implementation of SCI.
> 
> Oops, it's a picky issue. As I understand it, clean-room means to
> implement it from documentation. I think most of the ScummVM engines
> were done by direct reverse-engineering (I may be wrong). Does it
> bother you if your "clean" code lives together with "dirty" one (the
> rest of the project)? Do you want to maintain this position or would
> you change your mind with the migration?

  IANAL, but my understanding is that
  (a) all the engines presently supported by ScummVM are supported because
      the ScummVM team has legal arrangements with the original authors or
      because they're clean-room (which might be the case wrt Sarien).
  (b) dependencies matter:  If FreeSCI was to depend exclusively on _clean_
      ScummVM modules, then it _should_ be possible to avoid any legal
      and practical problems by forking off again and copying those clean
      modules.  (Of course, I'm only using logic, as opposed to the letter of
      the law, to arrive at this conclusion.)

  I strongly recommend you to look into the legal questions first-- if
_either_ of the above assertions is satisfied, then there should not be a
problem.  But note that you guys don't want to be sued by over-zealous lawyers
either...

[...]
> I think it can be done in an incremental way, not everything has to be
> done at the beginning.

  Sure, but I still recommend that you start with a quick survey of the
central APIs of the two projects (sound, graphics, configuration management)
to determine where sharing is possible and beneficial (cf. the various
discussions in IRC).


-- Christoph