Question in title, situation is you have identified a GPL violation for which the authors refuse to comply and release source.<p>The authors reside in a country which is known for its rampant violations and theft of intellectual property.<p>Is it equally unethical to reverse engineer their modified software and release it as open source? Two wrongs don't make a right etc.
Why would you think reverse engineering is somehow "wrong"?<p>You're not "stealing" source code, you're deducing operational concepts and then reimplementing it with your own work. That's perfectly fine in a lot of, if not most cases.<p>(Legal exceptions: your country forbids reverse engineering, or the software is patented [= in both cases, your legal system sucks]. But those are legal arguments, not moral.)
Ethics are a personal construct outside the law. (In some narrow cases, like psychiatry it's enforced, but that's the exception and doesn't apply here.)<p>In other words ethics are whatever you say they are. And polling the internet for permission will turn up a mix of aye and nay.<p>Is it -legal-? That's a different question, and "ethical " questions are usually a prelude to breaking some law under the implication that the law is "unjust".<p>As an aside I presume you are a -customer- of said company? Since GPL rights only applies to those with a legal, binary, copy.
It kind of depends, doesn't it?<p>The authors have (allegedly, and according to you) committed a GPL violation.<p>The "sins" of the country they live in have nothing to do with the situation.<p>Reverse engineering closed-source software is generally legal, as I understand it, unless the software is patented, in which case, it isn't. If the software is patented, I'd lead towards it being unethical to break a law in your jurisdiction because you (not through a legal system) have unilaterally decided that they committed a violation.