Having dealt with Sony when it comes to reversing things. I think that it's pretty safe to tear open the FF7 engine and spill it's guts. It's been done with 6 and the square engine has evolved to something extreamly different when seen in the PSX2. There are two things to remeber when reversing. 1) Tearing apart and publishing is perfectly within the rights of copyright law (at least in america) even with the DMCA in place. The 9th appelette court upheld the right to reverse engeneer. One of the lawyers who had briefed that circut cout was also involved with sony vs. connectix, which I was involved with. You cannot use the original source code to reverse with however. But I don't see Square giving this to us, no matter how outdated the engine is.
2) When creating a dervitive work from the reversing. It's safest not to be involved in the ripping apart process. It's not nessasary, but it saves headaches. The people working on the derivitive work can work on engine specs puiblished from the revering process. The FF7 linux engine will be dirived from taking apart the win32 version. I'll try and not deal with the original win32 verson, but I'm already "tainted". I'm kind of breaking my own safeguard here, but you have to break a few eggs...
I hope this clears up some things.
