No subject

enquiry into intellectual property in Australia, was held, and, the prospect 
was raised of l;egislation to allow reverse engineering of software, where the 
software was not available for aparticular platforms, so as to overcome 
restrictive trading practices ("if you want to run this software, then you have 
to buy a licence for, and, run, this particular operating system, as the 
software, we have crafted to run on only this particular operating system").

Could someone please clarify the status of this?

And, if reverse engineering of software, so as to enable it to run on platforms 
for which it was not written, is now legal in Australia, does software exist, 
that can convert software written for obsolete versions of Microsft Windows, 
such as Windows XP and Windows 9x, to software packaged to run on Linux 
distributions?

Thank you in anticipation.

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
  you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
   Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
   "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
   A Trilogy In Four Parts",
   written by Douglas Adams,
   published by Pan Books, 1992
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