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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?”

#231

Post by michaelmrose »

d1zzy wrote: post #61
opportune wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a software license in this case count as a contract? Moreover, interoperability is not the same as distribution no? Honestly ReactOS's lengths do not seem like overkill to me, quite the contrary. Even re-implementing an API is legally suspect these days (see: Oracle vs. Google re: Android). Copying the internals of a piece of software by having one person explain verbally exactly how it works to another person w…

Yes, EULA is a contract and has been successfully tested in court against reverse engineering: https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

Couldn't that trivially be defeated by having that part of the work done somewhere that doesn't accept such shrink wrap contracts? Alternatively even just a different person than actually paid for it?

If I receive a box in the mail or an exe in an email along with a request to document it to what degree am I party to any contract with the developer? I received after all nothing from them.

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

#233

Post by axelriet »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #225
admax88q wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worke…

My opinion about ReactOS has nothing to do with my job or my employer, you are trying to make this into something it is not.

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

#234

Post by axelriet »

michaelmrose wrote: post #228
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 t…

It appears you did not read what I wrote. The similarities are out there for anyone to see, there is plenty of leaked Windows code floating around including on GitHub, and I did not need anything else to form my opinion.

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

#235

Post by michaelmrose »

notus wrote: post #216
jeditobe wrote: post #148

Hello from ReactOS team! We don't use the leaked code from MS, We don't use Windows Research Kernel, We thank you for the PR campaign you have stared 'pro bono' for our project! ;D

You didn't spell started correctly both on here and on quora aka thanks for the low effort canned response. Maybe try addressing their points directly. This is bad PR for you.

You mean the accusations for which the accuser refuses to provide any proof?

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

#236

Post by sigmapiepsilon »

> baby mosquito on giant elephant...

As far as most *nix and open source users are concerned, Microsoft has been a dead, rotting elephant with flies all over it for a long time and someone urgently needs to clean that up. Looks like someone wants a little attention.

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

#237

Post by sigmapiepsilon »

> like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant.

As far as most *nix users are concerned Microsoft has been more like a dead rotting elephant covered with flies for a long time and someone needs to cleanup that mess. The engineers there should really take a look outside their bubble about how other competent developers think of their software.

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

#238

Post by pcunite »

axelriet wrote: post #229
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’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.

Axel,

Look at my HN profile and contact me, so I can send you an email and ask you something. Or, put a way to contact you in your HN profile.

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

#239

Post by anticensor »

iokanuon wrote: post #224
mbrumlow wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Possible.

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

#240

Post by rvp-x »

intea wrote: post #123

Honestly I always thought that that was an open secret of ReactOS. How else are you gonna achieve binary compatibility with a closed source OS. Of course there's symbols but those only get you so far.

In the past when porting netbsd to new architectures the approach was to first run a kernel with a binary compatibility layer to the existing operating system, be it something like OSF/1 or SunOS.

Not only was it doable, but people did it as a shortcut to getting a functional userland first.

It is easier on unix because they are similar to each other, but with enough persistence I believe Windows is possible too.

The steps are to get some kernel booting to a "native" userland, then add code to execute the simplest standalone Windows binary. Then when it makes a call to the kernel it will fail.

Generally tracing on Windows should give you a strong idea of what calls it makes to the kernel (I don't know, I have never developed on Windows, but probably it has something like ktrace/strace/etc.)

Once you can run a basic standalone programs, you try to add enough of a Windows userland to run bigger programs.

Once that's done, you can start to re-implement parts of the Windows userland. The symbols they export are public, you must implement all of them, and programs usually crash if you fail.

As for drivers, the Windows driver API is public, and other people have re-implemented it in the past. You can even pick up some of their work.

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