Arrived in SFO for DPA

[Alvaro G.]

We may also 'use' people having NDAs to do a 'clean room design'.

I in fact have signed some Hamamatsu NDas, but the docs I've received 
are related to the API for their SDK and not for their format ¬_¬ :(

On 18/10/14 00:38, Benjamin Gilbert wrote:
> If development is done properly, they don't need to agree.  (Standard
> disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
>
> Ideally, vendors would publicly document their formats (Aperio has done
> this in the past), in which case we can use their documentation.  In
> contrast, some vendors will provide documentation, but only under a
> non-disclosure agreement, and those agreements often do not explicitly
> state whether creating an open-source program to read the format is
> "disclosing" the contents of the documentation.  In general, my own
> choice is not to accept NDAs (and, thus, not to use the restricted
> documentation), though that is not necessarily the only possible
> approach.  Since this leaves me with very little usable documentation, I
> end up spending a lot of time with file format samples, tiffdump, and a
> hex editor.  (One reason why file format samples are so important!)