Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer software to port it to another system?

Posted by Igor Zinov'yev on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Igor Zinov'yev
Published on 2012-11-14T07:47:59Z Indexed on 2012/11/14 11:18 UTC
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I love gaming, I love games that allow modding and I love linux. But the fact that most games right now are targeted for windows (consoles aside), most mods and modding tools are also targeted for windows. There is a certain modder called Boris Vorontsov that makes a famous visual overhaul mod series called ENB.

What he does (or I think he does) is he enhances or changes the behavior of classes defined in the d3d9.dll library. Needless to say it almost never works under wine.

Recently I have asked him if he would ever release his version of the library under some open license, and he said "no". Now that I think of it, even if he did release his code, he would have surely faced some legal problems.

Now there is my question. Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer his version of the library to adapt the wine's open source version of d3d9.dll to be able to run his mods?

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