What information was "off limits" to IBM PC clone BIOS authors?

Question

Back in the PC clone days the accepted legally defensible method of selling a non-IBM PC BIOS was using a "clean room" whereby an engineer who had never been exposed to proprietary IBM information was given detailed "specifications" by another group who had studied the IBM PC architecture and available technical references, including the published BIOS source code.

What specific pieces of information were "off limits" to the "clean" engineer tasked with writing the actual BIOS code?

For example:

1. Would they be able to read and reference the IBM Technical References with the BIOS source code pages removed?

2. Could they reference electrical schematics or the logic diagrams included in the Technical Reference during development?

3. Was it permitted to ask additional clarifying questions of the team who wrote the specifications originally?

4. Would they be able to browse their own disassembly the ROMs on a retail-purchased IBM PC? What about tracing and observing BIOS call responses with a tool such as DEBUG?

5. What about being able to use a scope or logic analyzer on a retail IBM PC?

6. If the engineer had ever browsed the IBM Technical Manual (say in their personal life before the project started), would that permanently or temporarily disqualify them from ever being able to work in that capacity in their lifetime? Memories fade and I know that if I did a code review a year or more ago -- especially not with the goal in mind of ever being able to reproduce the work later, there's no way I could today remember more than the most cursory of details about it.

7. Were code reviews permitted by the engineers who wrote the specs?

8. How detailed were these "specifications" permitted to be? As in, could you only say "INT 14 takes port in DX and parameters in AL and returns these values in so and so registers in flags"? Or could it be more like pseudocode "first, send control byte 0x80 to port 3FB to set baud rate, then send high byte to port 3F9... etc, etc"?

Not looking for specific answers to each question - just using examples to try to understand where exactly the line was considered drawn. I'd expect some of the answers might be the intuitive "if any doubt, better safe than sorry and take them off the project". However, I'm wondering as much about the actual standards and practices that were in place that allowed companies like Award, AMI, Phoenix, Compaq, etc to successfully productize and sell clone BIOSes.

Related

Answer 1

Apparently, US law allows analysis of an implementation as a base for a clean-room implementation, as long as the analysis and the implementation is done by separate teams that are only exchanging specifications written by the analysis team.

In the case of the IBM PC BIOS, analysis was particularily simple, because you only had to thoroughly read the technical reference manual.

Some quotes from Wikipedia, from a Computerworld article on reverse-engineering:

[…] dirty room reverse engineering should be done in conjunction with clean room development by using two physically and electronically isolated teams where one team does dirty room reverse engineering and the other does clean room development. If a dirty room team exists, the clean room engineers can write a description of the portion of the specification that needs elaboration or clarification. The dirty room engineers then use that request to create additional functional specifications or tests.

and from a blog post on clean room policies:

To protect against charges of having simply (and illegally) copied IBM's BIOS, Phoenix reverse-engineered it using what's called a "clean room," or "Chinese wall," approach. First, a team of engineers studied the IBM BIOS—about 8KB of code—and described everything it did as completely as possible without using or referencing any actual code. Then Phoenix brought in a second team of programmers who had no prior knowledge of the IBM BIOS and had never seen its code. Working only from the first team's functional specifications, the second team wrote a new BIOS that operated as specified.

Phoenix's WoW, apparently, did withstand the test before court — before its jury — I don't think there's a guarantee that would have worked everywhere and in front of every possible judge. So, it's hard to say what the limits are of what exactly you can or cannot do to have your WoW still be accepted as clean-room. Given that, by the time, you were to, almost inevitably, face IBM lawyers in court, the answer might be: there were no hard limits other than "have the implementation team stay off as far as they can from any trace of IBM's concrete implementation and collect as much proof of your actions as possible".

Obviously, you need to make very sure that the Chinese wall between your teams is never broken, and you need some proof it never was. I think the term "Chinese wall" alone answers some of your detail questions. Consider that impenetrable, or your clean room is likely to get dirty and your position in court severely weakened.

You can, obviously, give the implementation team specifications of the hardware and the computer that you're building — because the implementation is for your computer, not the IBM PC - even if that's more or less the same thing.

Answer 2

Reverse-engineering code for purposes of interoperability is explicitly permitted by US copyright law (i.e., it is not part of the rights that the copyright holder can claim exclusive capacity to prevent others from doing). The problem was the possibility that the people who read the code might have been tainted such that they'd inadvertently rewrite the code with exactly the same sequences of instructions. If they had, IBM would have identified the sequences of code that were rewritten or copied from memory, and been able to claim copyright infringement. This is why Phoenix had to do it the way they did.

Having had prior access to the IBM Technical Manuals might run afoul of non-disclosure agreements (and thus be treated like a theft of trade secrets), if they were only distributed under secrecy. If they had legitimate, non-secret access to the Technical Reference, they could have referred to it and its schematics as long as they didn't refer to the code (as it would not have been a trade secret once it was made generally available).

A programmer could observe the outputs of a BIOS call via DEBUG. It is unknown whether they could trace into the BIOS (it would depend on the judge and jury), but I would not have risked it. They definitely could not disassemble or reference a disassembly of the IBM BIOS.

They would have been able to use a scope on a retail IBM PC, as it would not involve reading and potentially copying the code from the PC BIOS.

It likely would have been permissible to ask clarifying questions if the dirty-room team were still in existence. The specifications could be as detailed as the dirty-room reverse engineers felt necessary and appropriate.

Code reviews by the dirty-room team would be extremely iffy, and I would not have risked it.

If the dirty-room team had written unit tests for every function and its potential error conditions, those unit tests could have certainly been used to validate the clean-room implementation. (Unit tests are specifications written in code, and do not copy any code from the systems under test.)

Note well: I am not a lawyer. These are just where I think the boundaries would be, based on the problem as I perceive it to be from how it was explained to me.