Shalin Mehta wrote:
> Hello Johan,
>
> Bold step!
>
> I have seen these commands myself using Portmon. I am in a similar situation
> with BX51 scope (which uses same command set with a universal controller).
> My first choice was to try to do a device adapter for micromanager, but Nico
> informed me that Olympus's NDA policy has prevented Olympus scopes being
> supported in an open source environment. Interestingly, Olympus or NI
> provides labview driver (olxx2 library)
>
yes, my next step is to have the spec implemented in micro-manager.
since we reverse engineered, the NDA will not stop it, politics might.
> We were provided the NDA by local olympus rep, but have not yet signed it
> because of the dilemma of development effort turning out to be of little
> value. Can you elaborate more on/off list about the legal status of the
> approach that you have suggested? Is reverse engineering OK if one hasn't
> signed NDA? If there is zero chance of being jailed, I will be happy to
> join you in this effort :)
>
there is good literature, I got my hands on "Intellectual property and
open source" by Van Lindberg. the legal status is determined by prior
reverse engineering attempts. there are many success stories, for
example compaq and phoenix reverse engineering the PC so you don't have
to buy it from IBM. NEC took their cpu from Intel. accolade took the
entire code protection system from sega when replicating a console, etc.
reverse engineering is a procedure to avoid *copyright issues*. the NDA
makes reverse engineering impossible by disallowing information
exchange, traded for access to the system. reverse engingeering does not
protect from patents. which copyright might you infringe? since we're
not disassembling the hardware there is no way we could infringe on
Olympus copyright. then we have the bundled software, not from olympus
in our case, in theory it might have a "personality" in the way it
issues commands. this software polls plentiful, if we copy this and it
is not required behaviour it might be considered a copyright breach. so
really, we're a bystander between two publicly discussing entities.
still, it might be a good time to be paranoid, in the highly theoretical
case Olympus would sue (and effectively remove themselves from the
microscope market).
you want two teams at minimum, the dirty and clean. the dirty team is
allowed to disassemble the code and the hardware, essentially do
anything that could infringe a copyright had them let out an
implementation that might be influenced by how the product is
implemented. the idea is to "wash" these from any influence by having
them pass on the minimal spec to the clean team. these can based on the
specification happily implement and release the code.
my book lists 2 additional teams:
* the evaluation team that checks the spec in-between to remove
lingering unnecessary details.
* the testing team, which in less sensitive cases can be the evaluation
team, just reports if it works.
I find the eval team overkill here since the spec is so small, the dirty
team should be able to clean it up themselves
one additional note on copyright: not everything is copyrightable.
functional elements, things that are the only possible means of doing a
certain thing, cannot be copyrighted. so there is no way you can
copyright an OS-call or a for-loop. neither should you be able to
copyright the code to send out a command to the microscope, the code is
dictated by the format of the command.
in short, I think we are legally safe if we just monitor the connection
(IANAL), we are politically safe since the companies will earn tons of
badwill if they start suing customers, and we can be provably legally
safe through standard reverse engineering practices.
/Johan
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Johan Henriksson
MSc Engineering
PhD student, Karolinska Institutet
http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net
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