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Date: Tue, 01 May 2012 19:54:24 -0400
From: Jeffry Houser <jeffry@dot-com-it.com>
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To: flex-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [MENTORS] Handling Adobe Binaries
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On 5/1/2012 6:02 PM, Alex Harui wrote:
> On 5/1/12 2:51 PM, "Justin Mclean"<justin@classsoftware.com>  wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Perhaps we can consider this as a fallback?
>>
>> I was just look at this thread on the Adobe forums [1] where the same issue
>> come up before (for creating a Fedora package for the OS Adobe SDK) and it's
>> suggests that it may be possible to create our own dummy swc using code like
>> so:
> If we have to, I will ask about it, but to me, it violates the reverse
> engineering clause in the license, and potentially, the copyright as well,
> but I am not a lawyer.

  I am not a lawyer either, but I've been known to play on the Internet 
and such topics catch my interest at times; so this is my ramble on such 
things.

  I, personally, feel that it wouldn't violate the reverse engineer 
clause because all this stuff is already well documented publicly.  We 
wouldn't be reverse engineering anything; just creating our own thing to 
the own API.

  It shouldn't violate copyright; because we are writing our own code 
from scratch.  Unless Adobe wants to claim copyright on the API which is 
possible.  I know I read about a API related lawsuit at one point, but I 
have no idea what the results were.

  However, this is all very tricky as we live in a lawsuit happy world; 
and it makes sense to follow Adobe's guidance on such issues; as I doubt 
we could win against them (from a funding perspective) and any related 
wranglings would effectively stunt the project.

  The first lawyer I hired offered to "send a letter claiming X, Y, and 
Z" even though there was no legal truth to X, Y, or Z.  This was under 
the assumption that the people said letter was being sent to 
wouldn't/couldn't hire a lawyer to tell them "this is all a lie."  The 
same concept is used a lot these days w/ "Pre settlement Letters".