>when re3 was sued
The day reverse-engineering legal protections failed.
The day reverse-engineering legal protections failed.
These companies know very well these independent groups, even if it's on their legal bounds, can't afford a legal defense team and actively exploit that to abuse them away.
It is protected legal activity to decompile a binary and study the source.
It is protected legal activity to study some source code, describe it, and have someone who never saw the source reimplement the code described.
It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary.
re3 is somewhere between the latter two, and (again aiui from looking into it 2 years ago) they didn't have a clean room step.
It's probably a good thing no one will litigate it. It seems highly likely to be illegal and reasonably do. It would be a bad thing to spend money on.
According to what? If the rules are so poorly defined that way then maybe it's not a bad thing to disregard them. Because simply decompiling source code and then recompiling it isn't a simple one-step thing in the way you suggest, not even close.
If you wrote a bash script which decompiled and recompiled the original binary, that would be your property to distribute as you like
But it is not straightforwardly illegal (according to Microsoft et al) to decompile source code, train an LLM on it, generate the source code, recompile it, and then distribute the recompiled binary.
One easy 947 quadrillion tensor-operations lifehack