On: One Company Dared Compete With IBM And Macintosh C...

[kahawe]

> reverse-engineering having occurred in the last decade

For what it is worth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_4#Version_History

[mahmud → kahawe]

Samba team reversed the binary protocol for interop with Free Software, at a time when Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, was being investigated by the EU and the U.S.justice department.

This is a very specific example and I wouldn't go by it alone as a precedent.

[kahawe → mahmud]

What samba was doing has been going on long before the EU was looking into microsoft and continued afterwards...