this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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[–] limpatzk@bookwyr.me 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fairphone has actually managed to reverse engineer some of the drivers

Isn't that illegal?

I tried to find the article on it, but it was a while ago that I read, so I honestly don't know 100%...

But I doubt it would be illegal, as a company they're not small enough to fly under the radar and not big enough to flagrantly break laws and get away with it. Two possibilities that come to mind (and both may be true:

  • they did it via black box reverse engineering. That has less issues legally, since you're not trying to decompile someone else's code, but looking what that code does and trying to recreate it

  • the Linux Kernel's GPL gives them certain rights in that area