The key was that by publishing the BIOS source in the open, it was hard to prove that you weren't exposed to the source code when you wrote your own BIOS.
The clean-room approach was a neat hack that solved the problem, but it was hard to find people that had never seen the IBM source and could prove it.
The clean-room approach was a neat hack that solved the problem, but it was hard to find people that had never seen the IBM source and could prove it.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...