Subject:
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Re: Fan Thank You Letter
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego
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Date:
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Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:52:34 GMT
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Viewed:
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1263 times
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Todd wrote;
..major snippage
> This is also reverse engineering and is not
> against the law.
..major snippage
You may find that this is not quite true. There were some serious cases
brought by Microsoft against people who decompiled MSDOS and reverse
engineered a lot of MSDOS' undocumented features. This go tus to the point
where a lot of today's software license agreements, which most people gloss
over, include "no reverse engineering allowed" statements. Reverse
engineering may not be against the law as an act unto itself, but it is most
certainly covered by most license agreements.
I must confess, I have not studied the TLC software license agreement, but
it wouldn't surprise me if it states that the software is not to be reverse
engineered.
What may be possible with something as simple as the RCX would be to observe
its outward behaviour both from the point of view of the communications
interface and the electrical signals it emits and consumes via its I/O ports
and duplicate the necessary functionality with software running on a Hitachi
microcontroller. I believe that is essentially what LegOS does. You can
control three motors, read from three sensor inputs and perform two way
communications via an IR serial comms interface.
It scares me that TLC may ban the use of all words in all languages which
contain the letters L, E, G and O in that order, much like B, A and Y did.
Does that mean we can't use the word "allegorical" in public anymore?
Please don't get me wrong here though. I think TLC does a good job of
balancing "international mego corp" with "getting out there and working with
us AFOLs and devotees". Any company that supports a manufacturing effort of
the scale and quality of that necessary to make tight tolerance injection
moulded parts as mere toys has to be very careful to ensure that the
millions it spends on R&D and mould making pay off. I can understand their
extreme need to retain the purity of their icons like the square red and
yellow logo in a battle to retain market share and thus continue to pay the
bills. But I do think beating on LegOS is somewhat crass. Their own
sentiment is that AFOLs, despite their habit of spending maybe 100 times
what the average child spends on Lego sets, are still a drop in the ocean.
My question is then, why would it be that important to worry about what that
drop called their software?
Bionicle and Galidor don't have operating systems, so the real product lines
will sail on blissfully ignorant of the very existence of LegOS, let alone
whether or not Leg has anything to do with Lego .....
JB
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Fan Thank You Letter
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| (...) John is right in that if you agree to the licensing agreement that has a "reverse engineering" clause in it and you reverse engineer the software, you have violated the license agreement. I will search Lexus-Nexus case law tonight, but I know (...) (22 years ago, 20-Jun-02, to lugnet.lego)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Fan Thank You Letter
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| (...) Boy, I sure need a course in "how!" I am searching the literature on how LINUX hurts the trademark on Windows. Or more to the point, how Pocket Linux hurts the trademark on an HP Handheld or palm computer that originally held as its OS the (...) (22 years ago, 20-Jun-02, to lugnet.lego)
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