A follow up on that potential GPL Infringment. Someone commented with the reply made by the vendor. The interesting thing is that neither Dom nor I have had any direct reply from them; they just e-mailed people that did e-mail them.

But here come the arguments:

"We do have test functions that use Cocoa, wvWare, MacLinkPlus and several others _to compare_ our output to theirs for quality control. Mariner Write will have paths to these source files in our project but the dead code stripper should remove all trace of code in our shipping version (if not, there would be hundreds of references to wvWare)."

Given that the disassembly I got was from the result of a gdb breakpoint, I would hardly call that dead code. The code was being run when I disassembled it. It is there and really there.

"With Tiger (OS 10.4) deprecating most legacy code we have started using cocoa."

The current version I have in hand, that is available from their website does not link against Cocoa. Here the output of otools -L which equivalent to ldd on Linux:

$ otool -L Mariner\ Write
Mariner Write:
       /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 128.0.0)
       /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/Versions/A/QuickTime (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 47.0.0)
       /usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.3.0)
       /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
       /usr/lib/libmx.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 92.0.0)
       /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 88.0.0)

That's it. I did analyze published versions, because that is what matters. And it was done of MacOS X 10.3, because that is a version that the program run on.

Note that everything is just evidence I found, and the actually side by side code comparison of the assembly is for me sufficient. The "path" found was just a clue to start digging a bit, and probably the fatal clue.