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Software Engineering

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    The tainting issue is probably not a very serious concern in practice. In cases where you're reverse-engineering a commercial entity's code, then the firewall between the reader and the implementer is necessary for the (essentially inevitable) infringement lawsuit, so you can show that the was no possibility of copying code from the other version. In the case of most GPL code, unless you're blatantly infringing nobody's going to sue you, since it's not in their interest to do so. Commented Jun 5, 2011 at 23:07
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    You may like Russian roulette, its your choice. If for any reason -- competition inheriting the code in a way or the other, or just competition deciding to finance the lawsuit -- you are sued and convicted, its something which may drown your company. Even if you are not sued, if it is known the bad reputation may be a problem. Commented Jun 6, 2011 at 8:09
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    I think the "tainted" issue mostly applies to NDAs. For copyright issues, it hardly makes sense. Consider that copyright also applies to books, newpapers, movies etc. George Lucas probably saw the Star Trek series on TV before creating Star Wars, does that make Star Wars a derivative work? If a newspaper reporter hears about something on radio, does that prevent him from writing about the same event? Commented Jun 6, 2011 at 8:37
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    Clean room approach is just a way to prove that you haven't infringed copyright law. As I understand it -- and again I'm not a lawyer -- things developed without knowledge of the original work may not infringe copyright (but may infringe patents). Things developed with that knowledge may or may not infringe the copyright -- it is just harder to prove that similarities are due to random events or to the nature of the problem which make an approach natural. Commented Jun 6, 2011 at 8:49
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    @ammoQ: In the US, there was a copy infringement suit a long time ago (a statistical software package?) where a company was held to have infringed even though every line of code had been rewritten. Note that Star Wars isn't particularly similar to Star Trek, and that a newspaper reporter isn't going to write a story just from what he or she heard on the radio. Commented Jun 6, 2011 at 13:58