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."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-12-31
> 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.
A boot sector is 512 bytes long. (This may even include the partition table if it's the MBR). The code to load a boot image requires only a fraction of that - using BIOS calls you can write such a loader in about 50 bytes. This 50-byte-long code performs BIOS calls through a standard interface. For simple technical reasons the parameters to these calls are determined - otherwise the code wouldn't do the same.
Present to me a boot loader code that does the same and does not look "similar", to support your implication that the code was copied from windows. You may also look at boot loaders from other OSes to see that they look "similar" too, simply because there is little variation possible in a boot loader.
If all your claims focus on the boot loader, you have little point. You should really find a better example, because this one won't hold for a second.
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.
Every cleanroom re-implementation would again look similar, for the reasons stated above.
> I can understand that. Low-level assembly code is time-consuming
> to write. It is much easier to just copy it from Windows.
Since you claim the boot loader to be copied based on similarity, I heavily question your technical expertise. It is very bold to claim you understand the issue under these premises. Your implication that the code was copied was based purely on your "understanding", and has thus no ground to stand on, and is pure defamation.
Anyway, thanks for the link to the "Bye Bye" thread.
EDIT: Made this look less like an ad hominem attack.
Edited 2007-02-03 19:50
Member since:2005-08-30
> Since you claim the boot loader to be copied based
> on similarity, I heavily question your technical
> expertise. It is very bold to claim you understand
> the issue under these premises. Your implication
> that the code was copied was based purely on
> your "understanding", and has thus no ground to
> stand on, and is pure defamation.
From early in the audit phase:
Add boot sector
Modified: trunk/suspect_code.txt
---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------
Modified: trunk/suspect_code.txt
--- trunk/suspect_code.txt 2006-01-28 18:28:52 UTC (rev 9)
+++ trunk/suspect_code.txt 2006-01-30 00:21:41 UTC (rev 10)
@@ -150,3 +150,6 @@
reimplementation and documentation found at
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/kernel/dma.mspx (note: the paper is
temporary unavailable, but I'll make a copy available on request) ~ filip2307
+
+* Boot sector code was copied from Microsoft operating systems.
+gvg: Confirmed by brianp
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....