"There have been a number of press reports lately that discuss the techniques used in developing Samba, and that refer to those techniques as 'reverse engineering.' That term is quite misleading, and does not at all accurately reflect the techniques that the Samba Team actually use. I think that it is time to describe again the techniques that we actually use, and to dispel some other common myths about Samba development.
Myth 1: dissecting the waiter
"Classical reverse engineering techniques in software engineering revolve around the use of disassemblers, debuggers and other object code analysis tools to examine directly the executable code of an existing product in order to create a 'clone' that behaves in the same way. While these venerable techniques have been successfully used by many groups, they are not what we use in the Samba project..."
