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overfeed • yesterday at 11:23 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

The line between AI-assisted clean-room reverse-engineeing and open-source-license-laundering is a thin one, and I think the one described in the article crosses over to laundering. In classic clean-room design, one team documents the interfaces - not the code.

Replies

dhon_ • today at 1:43 AM

In this case though, the new driver has the same license as the project it was based on and explicitly credits the original project

  ISC License
  
  Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
  Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
  
  Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.
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Avamander • today at 2:00 AM

It heavily depends on what you mean by "not the code", if all the code does is implement the necessary steps for the interface, then it's part of the interface. It's an interpretation of an interpretation of a datasheet.