4 ms·

Good ReactOS developers don’t have to guess anymore. They can use this code as a reference and build their own version better than hasty M$ Devs.

jeroenhd 6y ago
No. If any maintainer of ReactOS evne just opens the source code, the entire project is doomed to get killed by lawyers. The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.
- wpdev_63 6y ago
  How would they know that they "opens the source code"? How would they prove that in a court of law that they didn't reverse engineer it? Seems very fishy to me....
  - jeroenhd 6y ago
    If they did, Microsoft sues, and the programmer is asked under oath, everyone knows. Unless the programmer decides to lie under oath, which will only make matters worse eventually. If they claim they just reverse engineered the code, they're in an equal amount of trouble. Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, unless you manage to do it in a very specific way which should still results in different code than what Microsoft wrote. The more source code leaks, the harder it becomes to claim plausible deniability. Ethically, I think that's wrong and should be fixed, but the copyright and software protection law is against compatibility projects like these when it comes to legislation.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  'The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.' Correct, but does anyone really care? Many of us will have died from old age long before ReactOS actually produces a UI without crashing! It seems to me that even if the team used ideas from XP, by the time they implemented them and tried to disguise the fact, that it would be so old and irrelevant no would care. Probably not even Microsoft. I would love ReactOS to succeed but the only version that I've managed to get working on my various test machines is about four years old. All the newer versions, and like all those before my one and only working version, simply crash.
google234123 6y ago
ReactOS developers have been using the old Windows research kernel leak for years as a source lol

jeroenhd 6y ago

No. If any maintainer of ReactOS evne just opens the source code, the entire project is doomed to get killed by lawyers. The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.

wpdev_63 6y ago
How would they know that they "opens the source code"? How would they prove that in a court of law that they didn't reverse engineer it? Seems very fishy to me....
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  If they did, Microsoft sues, and the programmer is asked under oath, everyone knows. Unless the programmer decides to lie under oath, which will only make matters worse eventually. If they claim they just reverse engineered the code, they're in an equal amount of trouble. Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, unless you manage to do it in a very specific way which should still results in different code than what Microsoft wrote. The more source code leaks, the harder it becomes to claim plausible deniability. Ethically, I think that's wrong and should be fixed, but the copyright and software protection law is against compatibility projects like these when it comes to legislation.
hilbert42 6y ago
'The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.' Correct, but does anyone really care? Many of us will have died from old age long before ReactOS actually produces a UI without crashing! It seems to me that even if the team used ideas from XP, by the time they implemented them and tried to disguise the fact, that it would be so old and irrelevant no would care. Probably not even Microsoft. I would love ReactOS to succeed but the only version that I've managed to get working on my various test machines is about four years old. All the newer versions, and like all those before my one and only working version, simply crash.

google234123 6y ago

ReactOS developers have been using the old Windows research kernel leak for years as a source lol