[ros-general] Ekush / ReactOS

[Ge van Geldorp]

Dear Mr. Anam,

I've read your announcement that appeared on http://www.ekush.com and on the
ReactOS forum at http://www.reactos.com/en/content/view/full/7336. First of
all, let me say I'm happy that you've decided to respect the GPL by
publishing your source along with the binaries.

The relationship between Ekush and ReactOS has had a very bad start.
Personally, I'm willing to forget about this and make a fresh start. This
would require honest and open communication from now on. Unfortunately, I
have doubts about some of the statements in your announcement, specifically:

"Initial release of Ekush (binary) recently has been published to the
Akshor.com and available for download and also started uploading weekly
binary snapshot. But it was impossible to make the source downloadable
because of the limited bandwidth issue. Site exceeds its maximum bandwidth
within 3/4 days after the binary made downloadable; a few GB bandwidth has
been increased but reached again to its maximum limit within another 2/3
days and gone down permanently."

Your account of the events after the Ekush release somewhat conflicts with
my memories of those events. Also, you make it sound like it was impossible
to publish the source because of technical reasons. However, in
EPC/doc/Readme.rtf (part of the binary package released last week) the
following statement was made:

"Q. You guys says “Project published under the GPL” but why don’t you
published sources?
A. Initially we decided that, EKUSH should be published under the GPL. But,
still there is some confusion within the team. We are now sharing sources
between team members only and unless the confusion goes removed we cannot
publish sources"

This doesn't sound like a techical issue but a deliberate decision by the
Ekush team. Again, I'm willing to forget this decision and leave it behind
us, but the fact that you seem to distort the truth in your recent
announcement worries me.

As some people on the ReactOS mailing list have noted, we need to be sure
none of the leaked Microsoft Windows 2000 source makes its way into our
code. Since we cannot compare submitted code against the leaked source (that
would mean looking at the leaked source ourselves, which would "taint" us)
there has to be a level of trust towards the people who submit code. I have
to say, so far Ekush has done little to earn that trust.

Just for the record, I'm just one of the developers of ReactOS. I don't (and
can't) speak for the other developers, or for the project as a whole.

Best regards, Gé van Geldorp.