Groklaw: Myths About Samba

“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…”

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