[dal]

This kind of reminds me of when someone reverse engineers a piece of software to document interfaces, protocols or APIs for the purpose of writing compatible software. Then a second person not involved in the RE process implement compatible software from the documentation the first person wrote.

This is to avoid any contamination and verbatim copies of code. Once you have read a piece of code there is a risk of "contamination" and you will be influenced by it. It does not matter if you directly copy it, write it out from memory or use an AI to regurgitate it. It will be a copy of the code. To me this is very clear.

[dayjah]

This sounds like “taint” in the M&A space. I’ve very limited experience of it and would be interested in hearing more from the better informed folks on this topic!

My limited experience: my then-employer opted not to acquire a company after doing due diligence. Ultimately we decided that the price of acquisition (both paid out, and also incurred in internal time) was below the cost of building a comparable product ourselves.

As the dev who did the tech portion of the due diligence I was now “tainted” by my knowledge of their system. As a result I could not work directly on the effort to build our own comparable solution.

[account42]

Another example is Wine: Anyone who has seen the Windows source code is not allowed to contribute [0]

[0] https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...