I think the fear of copyright infringement from developers being "tainted" by seeing or hearig about some software/implementation is exaggerated.
Copyright only applies to expression (code) not ideas. It would be extremely hard for anyone to re-implement anything in a matter exact enough to be plagiarism.
For a clean room impl the fear would be patents, not copyright.
Any software lacking patents can (my armchair lawyer guess) safely be re-implemented. If people reimplementing have had past access to the source code of the original, that's probably not even a great danger, so long as nothing is copied verbatim. Ideas/designs/architecture/functionality is not protected by copyright.
Copyright only applies to expression (code) not ideas. It would be extremely hard for anyone to re-implement anything in a matter exact enough to be plagiarism.
For a clean room impl the fear would be patents, not copyright.
Any software lacking patents can (my armchair lawyer guess) safely be re-implemented. If people reimplementing have had past access to the source code of the original, that's probably not even a great danger, so long as nothing is copied verbatim. Ideas/designs/architecture/functionality is not protected by copyright.