I have the feeling you're arguing against and about something I never said.
To clarify, I'll restate: "I believe Linus has even opined that any filesystem which was developed after Linux, whose developers are aware of Linux, could be considered a 'derived work'. [The view that any new filesystem, simply aware of, but created independent of, and after Linux, is a derived work of Linux] is of course ridiculous,..."
> It's why black box reverse engineering exists and is generally legal, while white box reverse engineering is generally illegal.
Oh, I agree a clean room implementation is generally the best legal practice. I am just not sure there are cases on point that always require a clean room implementation, because I am aware of cases which expressly don't require clean room implementations (see Sony v. Connectix and Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc). And, given the factual situation has also likely changed due to FOSS and the Internet, I am saying some of these questions are likely still open, even if you regard them as closed.
I agree, some of the Linux people have a very broad notion of what counts as a derived work, but I haven't seen much in the way of actual case law to support the conclusion that "white box reverse engineering is generally illegal".
Software generally receives wide protection for its 'non-literal elements', but it's not the case that every possible iota of its function falls under its protectable expression. Indeed, plenty of U.S. courts have subscribed to the "abstraction-filtration-comparison test" which explicitly describes how some characteristics of a program can be outside the scope of its protection.
But in practice, many of the big software copyright cases have been about literal byte-for-byte copying of some part of a program or data structure, so that the issue comes down to either contract law or fair-use law (which Sega v. Accolade and Google v. Oracle both fall under). The scope of fine-grained protection for 'non-literal elements' seems relatively unexplored, and the maximalist interpretation has seemingly proliferated from people wanting to avoid any risk of legal trouble.
I have the feeling you're arguing against and about something I never said.
To clarify, I'll restate: "I believe Linus has even opined that any filesystem which was developed after Linux, whose developers are aware of Linux, could be considered a 'derived work'. [The view that any new filesystem, simply aware of, but created independent of, and after Linux, is a derived work of Linux] is of course ridiculous,..."
> It's why black box reverse engineering exists and is generally legal, while white box reverse engineering is generally illegal.
Oh, I agree a clean room implementation is generally the best legal practice. I am just not sure there are cases on point that always require a clean room implementation, because I am aware of cases which expressly don't require clean room implementations (see Sony v. Connectix and Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc). And, given the factual situation has also likely changed due to FOSS and the Internet, I am saying some of these questions are likely still open, even if you regard them as closed.