Submitted by The ReactOS team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.12. As always a multitude of improvements have been made to all parts of the OS, though userland components saw special emphasis this time around.
A lot of work has gone into filesystem support, with the ultimate goal being the ability to run Microsoft’s filesystem drivers – a goal the project has not yet achieved. PXE booting has been fixed as well, and window snapping has been added, among many other things.
What ever happened to the recent news that ReactOS contained copyrighted code? Didn’t some MS engineer write a blog post with some pretty convincing evidence?
> Didn’t some MS engineer write a blog post
That is indeed true
>with some pretty convincing evidence?
Aaaand that’s where you fall on your face. The claims were that ReactOS copied the names of certain internal components that couldn’t be found without personally reverse-engineering the code. The problem there is that the code in question was under a shared-source license, allowing others to read and write documentation on it, which many did. There’s nothing stopping a clean-room implementation from using documents written by people who have seen the Microsoft code but haven’t directly published the code themselves.
As such, the internal names of these components, as well as their function, is quite well documented. You can in fact buy books on windows kernel development today.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Kernel-Programming-Pavel-Yosifovich/dp/1977593372/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Internals-Part-architecture-management/dp/0735684189/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Internals-Part-Mark-Russinovich/dp/0135462401/
FunkyELF,
Good question. At the time it was denied by reactos, and the accusations came from an engineer acting in an unofficial capacity. As far as I know MS never got involved.
There’s no reason for MS to get involved and face bad publicity given that reactos today is not a threat. But if it were to become a threat, I don’t think MS would have much difficulty suing reactos over so called “api copyrights” thanks to terrible legal precedent set by the google-oracle case. It will be hard to argue that a windows clone isn’t violating windows copyrights if the courts consider APIs to be copyrightable, which there’s now federal precedent for Also lawsuits cost money, MS could drag the case out and reactos could incur millions in legal fees that they likely don’t have.
From release notes
“A range of other improvements to user-mode components within ReactOS were made for 0.4.12, with some being more obvious than others. The most visible of course would be, more applications work, which is arguably the principal reason many users express interest in the project.”
Yes one could argue that Reactos is interesting to users is due to applications working on it. Good guess there. Here is your cigar.