ReactOS Forum

This incident will make ReactOS famous (I hope)! Or at least make it known by more people...
And new developers and useful people will join to this project.

...don't you think it could be a marketing strategy related to CERN's MALT project ?
https://home.cern/news/news/computing/m ... chnologies

"The sooner this will calm down"

It may calm down, but it will never be over unless ReactOS can document every single usage of these macro names, hacks and or undocumented kernel features (eg anything that pattern matches against WRK and other leaks etc...). That would mean having on hand public documentation of where the feature was described, or software that was reverse engineered and revealed the use of those APIs etc...

Self instituted audits on code origin don't hold much water after all... especially if all that is done at the end of them, all that is done is to say *we think we are clean* with no evidence provided. This is just the facts of the matter not a slight against anyone that has contributed or written mountains of definitely not MS derived code.

Am I the only one left here who remembers when the entire project was all but halted back in 2006 and no development happened for nearly two years while the entire code base was audited to make sure there was no legally 'dirty' code? This is just smoke and mirrors by this 'kernel engineer' who's obviously incapable of executing even a simple google search before opening his mouth and trying to speak authoritatively on a subject he hasn't even taken the time to understand both sides of.

KaylaMarie81 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 21, 2019 5:32 pm Am I the only one left here who remembers when the entire project was all but halted back in 2006 and no development happened for nearly two years while the entire code base was audited to make sure there was no legally 'dirty' code? This is just smoke and mirrors by this 'kernel engineer' who's obviously incapable of executing even a simple google search before opening his mouth and trying to speak authoritatively on a subject he hasn't even taken the time to understand both sides of.

It is clearly a Fear, uncertainly and doubt (FUD) case.

"have the exact same names"

The exact names of functions can be suspicious, but if Microsoft descriptions or documentations mention it, it's normal they used the same. And if a software asks for a function, normally the name is write in the error window.

The windows engineers are stupid or not? They can't understand, if the code is near to their code it's not because of plagiarist. If you recreate the wheel, you had to do a circle and not square, there is no hundred ways to do an optimized thing.

Then comes opensourced Windows :∞

shunesburg wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2019 12:03 pm "have the exact same names"

The exact names of functions can be suspicious, but if Microsoft descriptions or documentations mention it, it's normal they used the same.

I agree. Alex Ionescu in his talk that I linked to earlier mentions going over Microsoft's publicly released documentation very carefully looking for just such "Microsoft descriptions or documentations".

IMO, the people who leapt to the conclusion that ReactOS developers must have used illicitly leaked documentation and source code have not made their case at all. TheRegister's "Microsoft kernel engineer", Axel Rietschin, could have pointed to some portion of the ReactOS source code (it's all on GitHub) then asked TheRegister's readers who have legal access to Microsoft Windows source code to compare the two for themselves. Instead, all I see is nothing from Mr. Rietschin beyond saying something like a little bird told me...

The Register refers to a Quora answer. Axel is a Windows kernel engineer and has access to Windows source code.
EDIT: fixed auxiliary verb

if the Windows kernel engineer gave more information on the macro names or other areas of the code of concern that may be from none clean sources then you can look at the commit logs to find where that code came from and what developer committed the code

You're assuming the chicken came before the egg.

I didn't read it that way. By "were," I think the poster meant "were to give"... So if Axel were to have given more detail on what is questionable, then we would know which of our developers put it in ROS, and thus we'd know who to ask about how they came to code that code or choose whatever symbol names.

Quim wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 3:45 am This incident will make ReactOS famous (I hope)! Or at least make it known by more people...
And new developers and useful people will join to this project.

Yeah, but in a negative way. It would most likely give the project a bad public reputation though, because if people suspected that ReactOS is using pirated code from Windows then there will be a lot of criticism and legal issues to come. Everyone would just lose faith and call the project dishonest.

Yeah, we want good fame, not infamy.

Thanatophobia wrote: ↑Thu Oct 10, 2019 10:15 am Yeah, but in a negative way. It would most likely give the project a bad public reputation though, because if people suspected that ReactOS is using pirated code from Windows then there will be a lot of criticism and legal issues to come. Everyone would just lose faith and call the project dishonest.

But the evidence is necessary for any legal case..... It won´t be so easy to knock down ReactOS project.
It is surprising how FUDs spread distrust and fear about something effectively.