An Older Version of Skype Reverse-Engineered? (And Made Open Source?)
June 02, 2011
Has a Russian engineer truly reverse-engineered an older version of Skype and made it available on the web as open source?
That is what Efim Bushmanov is claiming on his new site:
http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/
Now, as he notes in his first blog post on the topic, his reverse engineering is based on an older version of Skype and so it's not clear to me how well it would work with the current Skype infrastructure. He claims, though, that it can send a message to Skype now.
How long the code will remain online is anyone's guess. As TheNextWeb notes:
It is against the Skype’s terms to reverse engineer its software but both US and European laws state that it is legal if it helps in terms of interoperability, if the technology is also not patented. Whether Skype will be able to force researcher to either remove the files or put pressure on the company hosting them is not fully known.
Meanwhile, I'm sure a good number of folks will be downloading the source code to see what they can learn...
P.S. The Hacker News discussion thread on this topic is also worth a read.
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