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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 th

by 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

by wk_end 5y ago

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