At the risk of not adding anything substantive to the discussion, I would just say if I was an engineer working on Windows , I would dial down the arrogance a little bit.
pathetic comment.
A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
91–100 of 291 posts
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#92Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#93ReactOS underwent a big audit years ago because people kept saying things like this, and AFAIK it's over and nothing exciting turned up. [1] - https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit
The author of post, Axel Rietschin at Microsoft, should remove this post and publicly apologize for his baseless defamation of ReactOS ("like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant") if he cannot give authoritative evidence to back his claims. There may be copyright issues in some subroutines, but calling the entire project "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel" is an extraordinary, arrogant claim. If yo…
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Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#94Why would any paying customer use ReactOS over windows? There is no support (security patches automatically supplied ETC). Windows 10 is evergreen and new feature appear quite often. Microsoft loses exactly zero dollars a year because of ReactOS. People who don't want to pay for windows just pirate it. Those who do pay, get it buldled with a computer or laptop that they purchase, or are corporations who need support. ReactOS will always be a tinkerers hobby... Did they steal code? Did they reverse engineer so good that it looks like they stole code? Who cares really... Not Microsoft. Why would they?
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#95Thanks for the link, o for a bunch of new followers on Quora today and was wondering why :) There are lots of good answers in this thread. In particular, someone took the time to look at the code, and that person wrote it only took them minutes to find similarities that make my opinion difficult to dismiss. About the lack of documentation, consider that only a tiny fraction of the kernel’s internals surface in the DD…
> Consider that the name of local variables is never part of the binaries, only public symbols are. "Never" and "only public" are wrong in the statement above, because non public symbols were indeed released by Microsoft. I guess you are young enough not to know that Microsoft accidentally did release some NT builds with the names of the internal variables, and such builds were intentionally made with less compiler o…
Microsoft does not release the kernel’s private symbols, trust me on that. But yes there was some leaks in the past, small portions of NT4 and W2K were leaked, I think I link to a Google query pointing to articles discussing the leaks in the Quora reply.
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#96Thanks for the link, o for a bunch of new followers on Quora today and was wondering why :) There are lots of good answers in this thread. In particular, someone took the time to look at the code, and that person wrote it only took them minutes to find similarities that make my opinion difficult to dismiss. About the lack of documentation, consider that only a tiny fraction of the kernel’s internals surface in the DD…
Uh-oh. Someone didn't check with MS LCA before posting this. Bad move.
I expressed my personal opinion, here and on Quora. I think I’ll be fine.
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#97Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#98Someone should get Alex Ionescu's take. He both used to be _the_ kernel guy of ReactOS, and he some wrote chapters in Windows Internals, some of Microsoft's deepest official public documentation.
Yeah, it seems like the guy answering here has no idea what he's talking about. Alex has a blog where he basically says that he'd spend the days writing Windows Internals and the nights reverse engineering the kernel.
So... doesn't that confirm what he's saying? How could you possibly "clean room reverse engineer" while you certainly are not in a clean room?
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#99In 2006 ReactOS halted all developments because of accusations like this. After a year long effort there was found to be no use of Microsoft source code in ReactOS. ( https://www.reactos.org/reset-reboot-restart-legal-issues-an... ) From what I understand a lot of the kernel work was done by clean-room reverse engineering. One person decompiles and documents the system and another re-implements given the documentatio…
Is that really clean-room, though? (Note that "clean-room" is not a term in US copyright law, it's just a technique that certain people hope results in a work that is not a derivative of whatever they're reimplementing.) If I learn a pop song, and sing it and accompany myself on the piano, and someone else transcribes it, then two things are true: first, of course it will result in identical melodies and chord progre…
> If I learn a pop song, and sing it and accompany myself on the piano, and someone else transcribes it,
I hate bad analogies. A bad analogy just confuses the issue.
There's one and exactly one song called "Billie Jean", which was written, composed, and performed by Michael Jackson.
There are however a thousand different works relating the history of Michael Jackson's work with Quincy Jones in producing the song "Billie Jean" for the album Thriller.
So is there one and exactly one implementation of a Windows NT kernel, or is there a possibility there could be many different types of Windows NT kernel implementations?
Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”
#100For MS's WSL, according to their devs, they only allowed themselves to read the documentation (external API). They didn't allow themselves to look at the code. Different case but also a form of reverse engineering.
It's the "internal data structures, macros" stuff that is problematic.