This is a blog post that outlines the history of reverse engineering in the technology industry, and comments on some of its implications today. With increasing legal challenges from the DMCA – a law that (among other things) prohibits reverse engineering of any technology meant to limit access, it is interesting to recognize what reverse engineering can and has accomplished for us.

The first two examples of reverse engineering that the article gives are open source projects. The ability of open source developers to reverse engineer the competing instant messaging clients developed by internet companies like Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft has had a dual effect – firstly, the article points out, it has allowed innovation by letting third-party developers (open source or otherwise) to create hybrid programs that bridge the inherent gaps in these incompatible protocols. Additionally, the presence of quality open source messaging software has helped to further the legitimacy of open source platforms such as Linux.

The second example is that of Samba, an open source program that allows Microsoft Windows based file sharing services to be both hosted on or accessed by any number of platforms. Because of Samba, users of Apple’s Mac OS X or Linux can interoperate with Microsoft Windows networks. The article points out that this has (also) lent legitimacy to Linux as a platform and helped it to compete in a world of proprietary standards.