News: ReactOS is dead, Welcome to ReactOS ! #15

2006-02-22, Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS is dead, Welcome to ReactOS !

Hello,
It is already a known fact that ReactOS project started
working again and that SVN servers are running since
some days again.

But what has happened? We read so much in the news?
What’s true?

Let’s summarize:

ReactOS project is Dead, welcome to ReactOS !

Every Opensource project can be split into 3 main phases:
- Starting and developing fundamental things
- Fixing then bugs, doing the long road of mprovements
and enhancements
- Finding something where it can be used

ReactOS now came to the 0.3 release, which is indeed
a major step, which means: it is running now. But
is it stable?
Now the long work of fixing, debugging and improving starts.

This also changes the focus of the project from
adding “functions” to make it “stable” and freeze on
some points – change to quality over number of features.

For some bad reasons, which are understandable, also
developers change. Real life issues, lack of motivation,
since the project has less “challenges” - doing
improvements, documenting and auditing are really a
very very boring work sometimes.

Also, there was some discussions about “copypasted MS
kernel code” inside ReactOS.
To say it in simple words: There is clearly NO code
which is directly copypasted from MS kernel code: we
see discussions and other legal actions of things
between SCO and IBM because of Linux.
The ReactOS project will not accept any copy of
windows code inside its repository.
All developers are told that they should go inside
themselves and think about this issue and if
somebody had access to windows sourcecode somehow
and learned from this and used it, then they should
mark the sections they think are dangerous, and
these sections will be reworked by “clean” persons.

The moment we are writing this message, the percentage
is 15% “clean”.
This does not mean that 85% of code are affected.
ReactOS holds ~2 million lines of C code and 15% are
fully audited and proven as a clean code.
We are working on it, we are working on checking the
code and finding suspicious code which might be
derived from leaked code or reverse engineering. But
this is lots of work and as we can not compare with
Windows Source - the methods used for auditing are
VERY complicated. So please, give us time.

Also this “audit” has the advantage already from
“stage2” of opensource project development, as
many people are reading sections already written and
this leads to bugfixes and improvements.

From now, ReactOS is fully online again, and we hope,
it will continue in the basis it was designed for.
Having people and friends doing some things together for fun.

Thank you – ReactOS.

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