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: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:2007-02-03
> 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.
"Because ReactOS has bad PR" as Julliard stated many times.
> 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.
Maybe because reactos is not nearly as big as Wine and has much more developers ?
> ReactOS is associated with the tinykrnl project, which
> doesn't practice clean-room reverse engineering
> required in some countries.
This is all about creating the docmentation for clean room reversing.
> 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
True.
> .. and how there's suspicious magic numbers in the ReactOS version.
Wine is full of magic numbers.
> As a wine hacker, I'm not touching a highly
> questionable project Redmond is already keeping an
> eye on.
I bet that they also keep an eye on wine and other foss projects.
Oh, and reactos is public so that everyone can check it, while wine's audit is done secretly. If that's not suspicious, I don't know what is.
Edited 2007-02-03 13:38
Member since:
2005-07-09
Since the mailing lists are archived and open, you should be able to produce a reference to this conversation, right?