you are seriously wrong, and you should tone down your rethoric. Calm down, take a deep breath and start thinking again. Thats all I have to say to your nonesense...
lol, thats exactly what he himself claimed he did. Not enough but it was apparent to him that he was not supposed to see certain source code, so he sneaked through the backdoor through looking at the "intermediary" code. Go back and read his post, and tell me where I am wrong. This guy does not remember what he wrote and he accuses long standing members of using different aliases.
Yeah, but stealing would imply I took it out of the company. You're obviously not a programmer. It's a different story when the "secret sauce" is calling hooks into a piece of code you wrote and debug symbols are there. It's just a matter of examining the call stack and what the compiler sees as input parameters. In Visual Studio, it's as simple as "show disassembly" and reading the assembly. Furthermore, you're a serious dick for implying reverse engineering is theft. How do you suppose all those IBM PC clones got made? Reverse engineers, that's how. You don't know wtf you are talking about, so you should just STFU.
"Software can be cloned by reverse engineering or legal reimplementation from documentation or other sources, or by observing a program's appearance and behavior. The reasons for cloning may include circumventing undesirable licensing fees or acquiring knowledge about the features of the system. In the United States, the case of Lotus v. Borland allows programmers to clone the public functionality of a program without infringing its copyright." From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_(computing) And, naturally, programs crash and give call stacks. If debug symbols reveal the public interface of a function, it's legal. Idiots. And what did I write? "This particular shop had about 150mil under management, and they never let their non-quant devs see their math libraries. I eventually reverse engineered the damn thing, because they gave us the debug versions of the binaries. I was able to take the symbols, use WinDBG, and such to piece together what they were doing." What does WinDBG use? .pdb files. Even if this defunct old place rose from the dead and took me to court, they'd have no case because placing breakpoints and looking at disassembly has never been against the law -- at least in this country.
Disassembling/decompiling software has nothing to do with what you wrote above or the Lotus vs. Borland case. I'm not a lawyer but with the passage of the DMCA I wouldn't be so cavalier about the legality of disassembling software so that you can clone it; its certainly not as clear-cut as you portray.
DMCA applies if you are trying to circumvent copy protection. If you aren't (which I wasn't, as I had the debug symbols already), there's no case. If this weren't the case, any programmer who has the debug symbols for the retail build of any Windows kernel would be in jeopardy of being sued by Microsoft. Or, for example, if Windows blue screens and you wanted to submit a report to the driver developer -- you'd need the system call stack and the retail debug symbols to figure out what chain of events caused the crash. The Ipod for Linux project would be screwed if this weren't the case. Apple didn't sue, they simply started encrypting their firmware. If the new project starts circumventing that, we may see something.