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A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

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Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#221

Post by djvu9 »

monocasa wrote: post #104
emteycz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The guy in the article is talking about variable names from the source. You wouldn't get that from Alex's style of reversing.

It depends on what exactly the variables are referred to. FWIW, Windows DDK's example code has a consistent style as the kernel code (at least for windows 2000/xp). You won't have a thousand ways of naming variables once you get used to that style.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#222

Post by axelriet »

acqq wrote: post #151
zzzzzzzzzzz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10&t=9m53s

The above link points to: “OffensiveCon19 - Alex Ionescu - Keynote - Reversing Without Reversing” and to 9th minute of the talk where it’s very relevant to the current discussion.

Someone pointed to that earlier. Great talk about how he gathers information to write his books.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#223

Post by axelriet »

mapcars wrote: post #197
Veen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would he say other than what he has already said? The ReactOS devs are not addressing the substantive points. No point in him repeating himself.

Em, for example how the book linked here several times is not documentation on kernel internals?

It’s not documentation no. Some smart people spent a lot of time observing and disassembling and explained a number of things but major aspects are entirely missing, and not all of what is written is accurate. In any case this definitely is not documentation, and certainly not enough information to write not only a compatible implementation, but a compatible implementation with very similar-looking source code.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#224

Post by iokanuon »

mbrumlow wrote: post #183
swebs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and it’s based on my lecture of ReactOS code at the time I downloaded it It would be interesting to see if this statement comes back to bite you in court if the opposite accusation is ever made. That Windows kernel developers have been stealing from GPL code :)

Man, I thought the exact same thing. I must have stolen it from you. Sorry! In all seriousness is this normal? I write and work on kernel drivers for the company I work for and have always gone out of my way to not view or interact with any code that remotely relates to the work I do (out side of what I coded). Our competitor even released their version of a block device snapshot driver and while I would be tempted t…

So, if a Microsoft kernel developer doesn't follow the practice of not reading kernel code with an incompatible license, does that mean we can assume they don't follow it generally? Can we assume they take code from the Linux kernel, violating the GPL?

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#225

Post by WhitneyLand »

admax88q wrote: post #159
WhitneyLand wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think senior management at MS believes your comments are a good idea or at best benign? Or do you think all the details of your comments have just not yet fully reached VP level, legal, and PR? I'm thinking they'd disapprove. That's just a guess, maybe they think it's fine and great. However, it may be worth at least considering another possibility. Does your company want random technical employees, making non…

Why are you policing other company's employees and presuming to know what their job is?

First off I'm not policing anything, because, how would I have the authority to do that?

Secondly you object to me presuming I know what his responsibilities are. I don't claim to know what he codes. However I'm able to make a pretty good guess about what the scope of a MSFT senior developers job is and this kind of thing is not even close, unless it's a special case worked out in advance with others. It wasn't worked out in advance in this case because he says that he made the comments before getting feedback from more senior people on his team.

Finally I assume some of the down votes have mistakenly conflated my comments with trying to hide information behind corporate walls.

I advocate hiding nothing - and fully support the new generation of companies who believe in transparency and ethics.

Being transparent and ethical has nothing to do whatsoever with letting developers try and make legal decisions when it's not their area of expertise. It also doesn't mean that a company shouldn't work together across departments to try to decide the right thing to do.

Good management and coordination between roles don't preclude transparency or doing the right thing in anyway shape or form .

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#226

Post by rkagerer »

While I haven't given it a test drive yet, I'm quite excited about ReactOS. I grew up on Windows, but have been in a state of disappointment for the last decade while I watched Microsoft slowly mutilate or let rot so many of the things I like about it.

I hope by the time I have to give up Windows 7, ReactOS will have a viable alternative - or that it and the rest of the market will have forced MS to get its act together. Maybe give me the Windows 11 I really want.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#227

Post by WhitneyLand »

forcemajeure wrote: post #152
WhitneyLand wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think senior management at MS believes your comments are a good idea or at best benign? Or do you think all the details of your comments have just not yet fully reached VP level, legal, and PR? I'm thinking they'd disapprove. That's just a guess, maybe they think it's fine and great. However, it may be worth at least considering another possibility. Does your company want random technical employees, making non…

I like this honesty and transparency, employers such as Microsoft encouraging it's employees to act in this way is a good thing. Shutting down discussion behind lawyers and bland public statements should be discouraged.

Collaborating across departments with people from different functional areas has absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty or lack of transparency.

If you have good people in those positions in your organization, they will come together and make good decisions.

If you don't have the right people in those positions, then that's not going to be a good thing irrespective of my advice.

Transparency doesn't require anarchy and anarchy doesn't buy transparency.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#228

Post by michaelmrose »

axelriet wrote: post #70

Thanks 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…

I find an opinion hard to credit when exact proof is sitting their on an open source repo everyone has access to and a closed source repo only you have access to.

You make a theoretically compelling argument like the "hack" you describe above and then leave out the only part that really matters where you prove it. It is entirely likely that you are simultaneously entirely correct and entirely unable to prove it due to company policy but this leads us to the next logical question.

If you knew you couldn't prove it why did you open your mouth? It seems the only result will be negative PR.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#229

Post by axelriet »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #143
axelriet wrote: post #70

Thanks 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…

Do you think senior management at MS believes your comments are a good idea or at best benign? Or do you think all the details of your comments have just not yet fully reached VP level, legal, and PR? I'm thinking they'd disapprove. That's just a guess, maybe they think it's fine and great. However, it may be worth at least considering another possibility. Does your company want random technical employees, making non…

I’m not speaking in the name of the company: I expressed my personal opinion about ReactOS and wrote back in 2017 that I think it’s a ripoff, after looking at their code. I’m not out there to destroy ReactOS, but if you ask me today what I think about it, I’ll give you the same answer.

Re: A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?”

#230

Post by michaelmrose »

opportune wrote: post #33
sitharus wrote: post #23

In 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…

Reverse engineering is usually considered a violation of proprietary software IP right (not sure the exact legal term)? I know at every company I've ever worked at I've been told to never under any circumstances attempt to decompile or reverse engineer another company's proprietary software product. Maybe that's just legal CYA but decompiling+documenting then re-implementing sure sounds like stealing to me...

You seem to have internalized ethics designed to maximize profit not happiness or utility.

Deliberate incompatibility is a lever that allows a degree of control that allows one to extract money both from end users and from companies that serve end users.

Having the ability to reverse engineer a compatible solution is a check on the maximum amount of rent seeking one is able to do before a competitor provides a more open or at least cheaper alternative that doesn't force one to entirely rip out existing components.

This is only like stealing if you believe a company has an inherent right to make a maximum profit without interference from competitors which is an interesting moral stance to take.

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