Hi,
I have recently purchased a AT89S52 programmer from a vendor who has also given me an utility that runs on windows and communicates with the programmer board to program the microcontroller via the PC serial port.

The way it works is that the windows programming utility uses its own protocol to communicate with the programmer board and then the firmware on the board(the firmware is burned onto a 2051 chip) converts the commands from my PC into the native programming protocol for the AT89S52 as per the data sheet that ATMEL publishes for the AT89S52 chip.

My problem is, I want to run it over Linux. But my vendor won't even share the source code for the programmer.

So my option is to reverse engineer the windows programming utility and create a port over Linux.

To do this, I figure would be quite simple. Just get a serial port monitor program, use it to eavesdrop on the serial port traffic and then figure out the so called 'proprietary' protocol and implement it in Linux. After all, the programmer board does not concern itself whether the data it is getting is from a program running on windows or Linux.

Now my question is:

Is this legal? I 'own' my PC serial port and so I have a right to see what data is going through it, am I right?

However, would it be legal for me to 'reverse engineer' the 'proprietary' protocol of my vendor and create a Linux port for it?

Any comments/suggestions would be welcome!
Isn't this similar to how OpenOffice.org can open word documents
created using MS Word in windows? I am sure that was NOT illegal to create the OpenOffice suite.

FYI, I also tried using wine on Linux but unfortunately serial port support is not yet enabled in wine.

regards,
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