
In preparation to hist talk at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels,
ReactOS project leader Aleksey Bragin in an interview details the code audit that the project is going trough, and reveals the intellectual property minefield that such a large reverse engineered OS brings.
"I can't stress this enough: up to now, no suspicious or illegal code has been found during the audit. Buggy code - yes, this was either fixed or rewritten. Also, another part which is sometimes speculated about - that the remaining 3% of the unaudited codebase is illegal - this is completely wrong."
Member since:
2005-08-30
No, I'm not on the current audit team, but I was a ReactOS developer from 1999 to 2006.
I have a few examples as the evidence you seek.
The FAT32 boot sector was and still is copied from Windows 9X. Compare it to your bootsector of any Windows 9X and you will see that they are very similar. The boot sector code has not yet been replaced, and the people doing the audit has marked it as "clean" so I guess they have no intention of reimplementing it. I can understand that. Low-level assembly code is time-consuming to write. It is much easier to just copy it from Windows.
http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/boot/freeldr/boots...
The Bye Bye thread is still there (this is what started the audit):
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/2006-January/007393....