Hacker News Reader

IIRC, that's how Compaq cloned IBM's PC BIOS, with humans doing the analysis instead of an LLM, without leaving IBM any legal grounds to sue Compaq for the cloning. Being a clean room re-implementation is also why Linux was able to clone UNIX without getting sued out of existence by AT&T or SCO so we'd all jolly well better hope that it still provides legal protection.

View on HN

If they had sent the machine code through a modem, out a speaker, into a microphone and back into a modem, that would've been illegal. So what you're talking about, really, is just a legal exemption that's been carved out for humans who do work from scratch themselves. There's nothing about cloning a BIOS with a team of people rebuilding it that is necessarily not IP theft, or legally sacred either. It's just that there's an even stronger case to be made that having an LLM do it is fundamentally not clean, because the LLM is itself just a massive decompiler / compiler. A bunch of humans performing the same action are somewhat exempt by custom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com