Oracle’s license agreement as it pertains to reverse engineering
I'm really confused why everyone's so upset by the blog post, for a number of reasons.<p>Firstly, it's perfectly aligned with the world of proprietary software. Oracle is probably more protective than the other vendors, because the restricted access to the  source code is at the heart of their business model. But none of the vendors I'm aware of is very keen on reverse engineering.<p>Secondly, the reverse engineering is prohibited for ages - it's not that it was added to the license agreement yesterday. And there are other restrictions (e.g. on publishing benchmark results), so rather that "Oracle is bad" I'd say "people who sign accept license agreements without reading them are morons."<p>And thirdly, the article is spot-on about usefulness of the reports generated from a reverse-engineered binary. I've seen shitloads of such reports, usually generated by some clueless consultant with the sole competence to run an automated tool and print the result. So it's probably (at least partially) a protection against a flooding the support with bullshit reports.<p>And it's also true that many of the companies don't have proper security rules (like encryption, identity or password management, network security) yet pay some consultant for reverse engineering one of the components. Because it's easier to spend a large amount of money than evaluating and rebuilding their infrastructure.<p>So while I dislike Oracle, you can't blame them for everything - the customers are the ones choosing the vendor. If you happily accept their license agreement, you can't later complain "but we want to do reverse-engineering" no matter how many MBA titles you have. If you want such freedoms, ditch Oracle and proprietary vendors in general. That's what open-source is for.