Cleanroom design is a strategy used in IT engineering to reverse engineer software programs. Clean code is a different programming idea that focuses on concise and clear code. Cleanroom design has been used as a loophole around copyright laws. The “Chinese wall” technique is associated with cleanroom design. Reverse engineering can be done using a decompiler, but it can put companies in complicated legal situations. The advent of open source engineering may make cleanroom techniques and reverse engineering more useful.
Designing a clean room is a particular strategy in IT engineering. With a cleanroom design, workers can reverse engineer a software program into various procedural steps, without knowing how it was originally constructed. This backwards process is similar to taking a motor or other complex mechanical device apart to understand how it works and how it is put together. Programmers do this by “deciphering” each step of a code process and getting a clearer picture of how it was originally written.
Another type of programming idea called “clean code,” differs critically from cleanroom strategy. Clearly written code is clear and concise, with little to no superfluous code. A cleanroom design, on the other hand, is a technique for manipulating existing code. Cleanroom design has historically been a loophole around copyright laws and allegations of product copyright infringement. The cleanroom design defense may or may not be effective in helping a company avoid liability for allegations that it has copied some type of software or IT product. When the copyright case is based on the use of “proprietary code,” a cleanroom design defense can be helpful.
“Chinese wall” is a term often associated with the cleanroom design technique. This type of procedure does not handle proprietary code. Engineers new to a product could theoretically recreate it using this technique.
When implementing reverse engineering of cleanroom design, professionals can use a software tool called a “decompiler”. The decompiler is central to the reverse engineering process, due to the way computer code is compacted and rearranged for “runtime”. Many computer programs are written in languages such as MS Visual Basic or “C Suite”. When they are embedded in “executables”, the language-level code is simplified into what is called machine code. At its most basic level, this is reduced to binary language, made up solely of a series of ones and zeros.
In many cases, it is not possible to decode the machine code into the original language-level code. When it is possible to do so, however, the cleanroom strategy is often a component of the technique used by engineers. By repurposing the code through a reverse process, the nature of the original code can become obvious.
Using the cleanroom technique sometimes puts companies in complicated legal situations about what constitutes intellectual property rights on software products. Most professionals would agree that this type of situation is best avoided, but in some cases, reverse engineering can be beneficial to a business or enterprise. As the advent of “open source engineering” changes the number of people looking at software, there is more chance that cleanroom techniques and reverse engineering could become more useful as strict intellectual property laws can be relaxed due to the open source code principle, which posits the idea that code should be shared and not protected by programmers.
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