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It's not based on any Windows binary code, or the project would be forever poisoned with respect to copyright. They actively prevent anyone who has seen the Win

It's not based on any Windows binary code, or the project would be forever poisoned with respect to copyright. They actively prevent anyone who has seen the Windows source code from working on the project.

edgyquant 5y ago
React OS has come under fire before, and been audited, for including windows code[2]. Also the project would not be poisoned with respect to copyright, according to US law. > Clean room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In NEC Corp. v Intel Corp. (1990), NEC sought declaratory judgment against Intel's charges that NEC's engineers simply copied the microcode of the 8086 processor in their NEC V20 clone. A US judge ruled that while the early, internal revisions of NEC's microcode were indeed a copyright violation, the later one, which actually went into NEC's product, although derived from the former, were sufficiently different from the Intel microcode it could be considered free of copyright violations.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design 2. https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-source-code-review/ https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...
- wk_end 5y ago
  ReactOS has not "been audited" because they came "under fire" for including Windows code as your post implies - they chose to audit themselves to ensure that they were free of Windows code (they were), to be safe, and for the optics: so that observers see that they're serious about being safe.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    ReactOS was audited, it doesn’t matter if they agreed to it. The fact is that an engineer claimed it had copied windows code and it had an assembly function believed to be taken directly from windows. The reason I mention it is that this thread has been claiming it’s illegal to study and rewrite disassembled code but that isn’t the case. It’s illegal to copy it but clean room implementations depend on disassembling code and documenting it allowing for another person to then do the implementation. Im definitely not taking shots at ReactOS here, I’m on their side and am fascinated with the project. You’re right I should have been clear that they shut down and has themselves audited instead of risking a court battle but I don’t think the difference matters much, either way they were gonna have a code audit to disprove these allegations. But in regards to them, there’s a lot of wrong information floating around this thread. > claim was made on 17 January 2006 by developer Hartmut Birr on the ReactOS developers mailing list (ros-dev) that ReactOS contained code derived from disassembling Microsoft Windows.[25] The code that Birr disputed involved the function BadStack in syscall.S,[26] as well as other unspecified items.[27] Comparing this function to disassembled binaries from Windows XP, Birr argued that the BadStack function was simply copy-pasted from Windows XP, given that they were identical. Alex Ionescu, the author of the code, asserted that while the Windows XP binary in question was indeed disassembled and studied, the code was not merely copy-pasted, but reimplemented; the reason why the functions were identical, Ionescu claimed, was because there was only one possible way to implement the function https://marc.info/?l=ros-dev&m=118775346131654&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=ros-dev&m=118775346131654&w=2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

edgyquant 5y ago

React OS has come under fire before, and been audited, for including windows code[2]. Also the project would not be poisoned with respect to copyright, according to US law. > Clean room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In NEC Corp. v Intel Corp. (1990), NEC sought declaratory judgment against Intel's charges that NEC's engineers simply copied the microcode of the 8086 processor in their NEC V20 clone. A US judge ruled that while the early, internal revisions of NEC's microcode were indeed a copyright violation, the later one, which actually went into NEC's product, although derived from the former, were sufficiently different from the Intel microcode it could be considered free of copyright violations.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design 2. https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-source-code-review/ https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...

wk_end 5y ago
ReactOS has not "been audited" because they came "under fire" for including Windows code as your post implies - they chose to audit themselves to ensure that they were free of Windows code (they were), to be safe, and for the optics: so that observers see that they're serious about being safe.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  ReactOS was audited, it doesn’t matter if they agreed to it. The fact is that an engineer claimed it had copied windows code and it had an assembly function believed to be taken directly from windows. The reason I mention it is that this thread has been claiming it’s illegal to study and rewrite disassembled code but that isn’t the case. It’s illegal to copy it but clean room implementations depend on disassembling code and documenting it allowing for another person to then do the implementation. Im definitely not taking shots at ReactOS here, I’m on their side and am fascinated with the project. You’re right I should have been clear that they shut down and has themselves audited instead of risking a court battle but I don’t think the difference matters much, either way they were gonna have a code audit to disprove these allegations. But in regards to them, there’s a lot of wrong information floating around this thread. > claim was made on 17 January 2006 by developer Hartmut Birr on the ReactOS developers mailing list (ros-dev) that ReactOS contained code derived from disassembling Microsoft Windows.[25] The code that Birr disputed involved the function BadStack in syscall.S,[26] as well as other unspecified items.[27] Comparing this function to disassembled binaries from Windows XP, Birr argued that the BadStack function was simply copy-pasted from Windows XP, given that they were identical. Alex Ionescu, the author of the code, asserted that while the Windows XP binary in question was indeed disassembled and studied, the code was not merely copy-pasted, but reimplemented; the reason why the functions were identical, Ionescu claimed, was because there was only one possible way to implement the function https://marc.info/?l=ros-dev&m=118775346131654&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=ros-dev&m=118775346131654&w=2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit