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."
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Member since:2005-07-09
Member since:2006-08-02
Since the mailing lists are archived and open, you should be able to produce a reference to this conversation, right?
WRONG. The "Bye bye" thread on the mailing list discussing some of these issues was apparently deleted. If that's not suspicious, I don't know what is.
Ask yourself why wine doesn't accept any ReactOS derived code. Wine was also audited and you can read on wine's development mailing list all about what wine developers think of ReactOS.
wine was audited by an outside group. ReactOS was audited only internally.
wine's audit took almost 2 years. ReactOS's audit went very quickly.
wine has tests to prove undocumented behaviour, ReactOS has very few.
ReactOS is associated with the tinykrnl project, which doesn't practice clean-room reverse engineering required in some countries.
Things mentioned on the Bye-bye thread (I've got it archived, if anyone wants to see) included how with each successive revision, the code that makes a system call converges more and more to the Windows XP code, and how there's suspicious magic numbers in the ReactOS version.
As a wine hacker, I'm not touching a highly questionable project Redmond is already keeping an eye on.
Member since:2005-07-18
The advantage of an open source project is that everyone knows nothing is hidden--it's all available for anyone to inspect. If there's stolen code then there is good incentive for the victim to get busy and find it and complain. I don't hear any complaining.
The real issue is how to be sure that closed source projects haven't stolen code.
Member since:2005-07-06
I'd suggest you post a link (or two) that proves your point, before your post gets modded down to -5 for "personal attacks/offensive language" *.
- Gilboa
* IMHO calling someone a liar with nothing to back it up is both a personal attack and offensive language.
Edited 2007-02-03 00:16
Member since:
2006-08-17
"I can't stress this enough: up to now, no suspicious or illegal code has been found during the audit."
That's not true. There was a lot of compromised kernel code found in reactos. Of course it has been rewritten now but that doesn't change the fact that he's lying.
I recall seeing some logs on reactos and some conversations bettween the developers that proved this.
At least the good new is that when the code audit is over, someone or some people will have learned not to include illegal code again.