another discussion of reverse-engineering

[Brock]

It doesn't matter if it's better than BBB. If it's derived, it MUST be open sourced now. Not later.

Please stop passing off others peoples work as your own. No one objects to building on top of others work and "standing on the shoulders of giants" is a famous quote about science and progress. It's expected and normal. As is complying with software licenses.

​how about open source oodle ?

[Shelwien]

There's a difference between learning from other's work and claiming authorship.

Reverse-engineering at the level of powzix/rarten is hard work and requires deep understanding of the algorithm.
Its also open-source, so we can clearly see it.
Yes, it also can decrease profits of copyright holders (but can as well increase them due to free advertisement; depends on actual quality/complexity of the work),
but copyright holders and developers are usually not the same people.

While changing a few lines and claiming authorship is a simple but dumb thing, mostly done by children to "show off".
More experienced people usually understand that clearly stating what is original work and what are your improvements
gets you taken more seriously.

[dnd]

​

Reverse-engineering at the level of powzix/rarten is hard work and requires deep understanding of the algorithm.

​In the end product, you see only the last outcomes of a long cycle development.
Oodle authors and christian for ex. have spend countless hours experimenting and optimizing
several algorithms, functions and parameters.
In data compression, it is not rarely that you do 10 experiments and you don't see any improvement
of the ratio or in the speed of your program.

There's a difference between learning from other's work

For the purpose of learning oodle developpers have done a lot of work publishing their ideas on "http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com"
and "https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/"

There are also tons of source code on github and 1000 papers on arxiv and on the net for learning and getting new ideas.

Some people are also doing RE to understand the internals of programs, but they are not publishing
the source code or writing a competitive open source product and publishing it on github.

In contrast as most people are believing here, reverse engineering a software product and publishing the source code
is illegal, even in europe. Merely and only RE for the purpose of interoperability is legal.

Also, the question here, if RE is legal, why nobody have the courage to do RE of winrar or power archiver and publish the source code.
These products are not less interesting. Are these companies too big or is the source country relevant?
Publishing the decoder source code like in rar is not a reason to be protected from RE.

...well increase them due to free advertisement,..

This is funny thinking, as the original authors can't publish/sell the source code or some parts theirself.

[Shelwien]

> In the end product, you see only the last outcomes of a long cycle development.

Let's imagine a world with perfect know-how protection.
Something like alien AIs impossible to trick or avoid, that automatically file patents for any innovations
and don't let anyone profit from previous work (including posting it for free
since its a COPY-right violation and can be considered an attempt to profit
indirectly via advertisement).
Don't you think that all software development would stop within a year,
once patent trolls claim everything?

> For the purpose of learning oodle developpers have done a lot of work publishing their ideas

Okay, are you saying that its fair to take down all paq-related software (newer than paq1),
because all the coders use SSE, taken by Serge Osnach from ppmonstr source that I decompiled?
Since Dmitry Shkarin also doesn't want to allow ppmonstr reverse-engineering?

Shkarin posted some papers with algorithm description, but it was worded in such a way,
that nobody was able to reproduce his results - most likely not intentionally, but so what.
Ppmonstr was taking top places in benchmarks for years and nobody was able to compete with it in compression.

Or are you saying that its ok if you're oblivious?

lzma is based on LZX reverse-engineering (http://nishi.dreamhosters.com/u/lzx0a.png),
and LZX is not officially open-source.
But its okay for cbloom to sell lzma clones (LZNA), right?

> There are also tons of source code on github and 1000 papers on arxiv and on the net for learning and getting new ideas.

Its obviously not enough, since state-of-art algorithms are rarely described in full.
Natural languages are also very unfit for algorithm descriptions.

> Some people are also doing RE to understand the internals of programs, but they are not publishing
> the source code or writing a competitive open source product and publishing it on github.

So you're saying that its better to do RE secretly, but sharing is not allowed.
I don't agree, its hypocritical.

_Real_ inventors would always have benefits comparing to reverse-engineers,
since they have better understanding, unpublished intermediate sources and extra tools.

And do you have an example of "competitive open source product"?
Rarten source is not a product. Its not developed or supported and its buggy, basically only can be used for learning.

> Also, the question here, if RE is legal,
> why nobody have the courage to do RE of winrar or power archiver and publish the source code.

Winrar is hardly state-of-art, and it has an open-source unrar library which is enough for most.
When it was state-of-art, it was also targeted - winace is a clone and there was a console archiver
which could compress to rar2 format (X1 or something).

As to powerarchiver, its even less relevant than .rar, and most of compression engine is open-source,
except for reflate, which was reverse-engineered too.

> ...well increase them due to free advertisement,..
> This is funny thinking, as the original authors can't publish/sell the source code or some parts theirself.

Authors working for companies usually cannot (NDA).

[suryakandau@yahoo.co.id]

There's a difference between learning from other's work and claiming authorship.

Reverse-engineering at the level of powzix/rarten is hard work and requires deep understanding of the algorithm.
Its also open-source, so we can clearly see it.
Yes, it also can decrease profits of copyright holders (but can as well increase them due to free advertisement; depends on actual quality/complexity of the work),
but copyright holders and developers are usually not the same people.

While changing a few lines and claiming authorship is a simple but dumb thing, mostly done by children to "show off".
More experienced people usually understand that clearly stating what is original work and what are your improvements
gets you taken more seriously.

How about paq8pxd that changing from paq8px69 and changing the authorship from Jan ondrus to kaido orav ?

[Shelwien]

>paq8pxd_v69.exe
paq8pxd69f archiver (C) 2018, Matt Mahoney et al.
Free under GPL, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
Compiled Oct 23 2019, compiler gcc version 8.3.0

or do you mean this:

    /* paq8pxd file compressor/archiver.  Release by Kaido Orav

    Copyright (C) 2008-2014 Matt Mahoney, Serge Osnach, Alexander Rhatushnyak,
    Bill Pettis, Przemyslaw Skibinski, Matthew Fite, wowtiger, Andrew Paterson,
    Jan Ondrus, Andreas Morphis, Pavel L. Holoborodko, Kaido Orav, Simon Berger,
    Neill Corlett

[suryakandau@yahoo.co.id]

>paq8pxd_v69.exe
paq8pxd69f archiver (C) 2018, Matt Mahoney et al.
Free under GPL, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
Compiled Oct 23 2019, compiler gcc version 8.3.0

or do you mean this:

    /* paq8pxd file compressor/archiver.  Release by Kaido Orav

    Copyright (C) 2008-2014 Matt Mahoney, Serge Osnach, Alexander Rhatushnyak,
    Bill Pettis, Przemyslaw Skibinski, Matthew Fite, wowtiger, Andrew Paterson,
    Jan Ondrus, Andreas Morphis, Pavel L. Holoborodko, Kaido Orav, Simon Berger,
    Neill Corlett

>/* paq8pxd file compressor/archiver. Release by Kaido Orav

Copyright (C) 2008-2014 Matt Mahoney, Serge Osnach, Alexander Rhatushnyak,
Bill Pettis, Przemyslaw Skibinski, Matthew Fite, wowtiger, Andrew Paterson,
Jan Ondrus, Andreas Morphis, Pavel L. Holoborodko, Kaido Orav, Simon Berger,
Neill Corlett
Yes it is

[Shelwien]

Do you understand english? "Release by" is quite different from "copyright".
Yes you can add yourself to the list of authors if you made changes.
No you can't take an open-source program, post a renamed rebranded binary and expect it to look good.

[suryakandau@yahoo.co.id]

Do you understand english? "Release by" is quite different from "copyright".
Yes you can add yourself to the list of authors if you made changes.
No you can't take an open-source program, post a renamed rebranded binary and expect it to look good.

Btw why kaido orav can rebranded paq8px v69 by Jan ondrus to paq8pxd ?? Paq8pxd v1.0 is comes from paq8px v69 by Jan ondrus.

[Shelwien]

1) Its still open-source
2) The relation is clearly visible from the name

Sure, you can rename the project (its even preferable in your case). Just specify the origin.
When somebody else discovers it, it becomes a clear case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism