[mxey]

That’s the opposite of clean-room. The whole point of clean-room design is that you have your software written by people who have not looked into the competing, existing implementation, to prevent any claim of plagiarism.

“Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.”