OSNews > Thread > "RE[4]: Not true" by exception

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd Feb 2007 14:44 UTC, submitted by Floris Lambrechts

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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RE[4]: Not true

by exception on Sat 3rd Feb 2007 20:01 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Not true"

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

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RE[5]: Not true

by Morin on Sun 4th Feb 2007 15:28 in reply to "RE[4]: Not true"

Member since:
2005-12-31

As said before, it would be close to impossible to write a boot sector that does *not* look copied. You'd have to artificially make it look different, but then you could do the same with copied code too. Do you have a more striking example of copied, but marked 'audited' code?

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