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A blackbox implementation (no access to original source code) is clearly ethical. The purpose of an API is specifically to allow interoperability with software that you don't write; the presence of a competitor (open source or not) who re-implements the server side of your API is a Good Thing for a competitive market place.

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to extend on that idea, I'm fairly certain that a "clean-room" reverse engineering of a competitor's product HAS been shown to be legal. That is to say, as long as you can prove that the person(s) doing the reverse engineering didn't have any access to proprietary information about the workings of the product they were reverse engineering.

The classic example is the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS for 'IBM compatible' machines. And it was done with 2 teams, one analyzing and one implementing.

But that predates my existence :-)

Which is why the appeals court decision was so shocking.

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