Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 21st Feb 2006 23:50 UTC, submitted by Fireball
ReactOS released news today regarding the project's status, recent confusion and future development. The news item is slightly confusing in itself though, but the the gist is this: there is no code inside the ReactOS SVN repository that has been directly pasted from Windows source code. However, it might be that some people had access to Windows source code and used it as inspiration-- these developers should mark their code as 'dangerous', and these sections will then be audited by a 'clean' person. Currently, 15% has been audited and can be declared 'clean'.
Thread beginning with comment 98628
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-12-31
> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Proprietary code is so
> viral, just looking at it could taint you. That's worse
> than the flu! You never run into such problems with
> open source code.
This isn't entirely true. If I understand correctly, looking at the code is dangerous because you might violate copyright unintentionally, by writing code that is (almost) the same as the code you looked at. This can happen with free/open source software just the same way, which is also protected by copyright. If I look at the Linux kernel sources, and then write the same code for a project which is distributed closed-source or maybe under the BSD/MIT license, I have violated copyright just the same way.
It just happens that authors of F/OSS don't mind because they usually agree that it would be ridiculous to sue me for that.
- Morin