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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?”

#251

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…

Anyone spending time giving detailed explanations regarding manual transmissions and engines in general deserves a follow :)

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

#252

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…

This was a fairly pedantic post but I'll reply anyways.

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

Maybe policing isn't the right word, but your earlier post was fairly condescending to axelriet. "I think they'd disapprove... It's your job to do this... It's your job to do that..."

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

#253

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…

It seems like you're personally offended by the project. If some of the code that got presumably stolen is yours I can definitely understand.

Looking at how slowly that project is moving though I think your conclusion is right: They don't care. In some other comment you mentioned how the project seems to be stuck in the 2000/XP area. How relevant does that make this project today? But whether it's based on stolen code or not, it seems like the right choice to focus on getting that completed before moving on to everything that came after. And after all, Windows isn't just the kernel. They have to implement a lot of user space too, because software out there might assume it's available and behaving in very certain ways. Just an explorer clone sounds like a mammoth task on its own.

I still find the project very interesting and overly ambitious, even if code was stolen. I think at their current pace, reactos won't become usable before operating systems became largely irrelevant and everything runs in the cloud. Everyone still working on it today is probably just doing it for the challenge.

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

#254
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, now please re-read your statement Do you understand that internal data structures entirely from the NT kernel, including (why?) their names != verbatim code from NT in your source The program code is logic first of all. For the similarities of names and structures itself - the answer is in this already mentioned video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10&t=9m53s from the 9:53 moment of time. TL:DW there…

Never having had access to the NT kernel source, I don't actually know how deep these similarities go. When MS kernel engineers say those are not only superficial, I'm inclined to believe that until ReactOS have at least conducted an investigation. It's a serious allegation that deserves more than a casual brush-off and some condescending statements about publicly available debug symbols. If MS is really full of shit…

But how could ReactOS prove they didn't copy without having access to the NT source to show people differences? Unless there's some hard evidence, it shouldn't be up to the ReactOS team to provide evidence, but on the accuser.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well that's categorically untrue. Sure they don't release private symbols intentionally but they have done in the past accidentally. At that point it becomes a bit of a grey area, undoubtedly leaked/stolen source code is a no-no but reversing from private symbols when they do leak seem harder to quantify as you still need to reverse engineer the code, just structures/names etc are already known. Private symbols are n…

> Sure they don't release private symbols intentionally but they have done in the past accidentally.

Even if that is the case, it's an incredibly poor idea to use them, so that the code ends up with spurious similarities in spite of being (otherwise) cleanly developed.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't GPL actually offer a person a freedom to study the code? Isn't it a common phenomena of rewriting GPL Linux Driver into BSD Licensed driver which will be put into mainline *BSD?

I know the case of OpenBSD 'stealing' GPL code from broadcom linux driver, but it was done by a naive kernel developer who copy-pasted the code and the maintainer who didn't bother to check the authenticity of the code. But AFAIK no GPL driver writer has a problem with the driver being rewritten into BSD licence.

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

#258
This thing is odd, because most companies I've worked for have pretty strong bans on making statements like this outside of official channels.

That said, frankly its probably not a big deal because reactos, has been pretty clear about making a best case effort to avoid this kind of problem and solving it when it happens. Hiring 3rd party IP review companies to compare their code with the illegitimate windows drops is probably fairly inexpensive (given how much I seen paid during acquisitions I've been involved in) and something I imagine they have done. Its the kind of thing I might even expect that having a dialog with the right people at MS might go a long way to helping reactos avoid infringement. Heck it wouldn't surprise me if MS would fund something like this.

OTOH, it might take a more premium review service to assure compliance. I spent some time reverse engineering win2k, reading the native api book, and various other books full of windows reverse engineering documentation at the turn of the century for a driver project I was working on that hooked into some unusual parts of the OS.

NT has some wonderful documentation available which paints all the broad strokes, combined with Microsoft's own docs/samples/symbols/checked builds/etc and the fact that large parts of the OS seem to be written fairly well (and seemingly avoid a lot of spaghetti) doesn't lot of black box areas. NT also does a fine job with very verbose and descriptive variable and function names (unlike large parts of linux written to conform to 80 columns where frequently the solution to overrunning the column has been to name things very tersely).

So its not surprising that there are directory structure similarities. The natural thing to do is put subsystems in their own directories and nest them logically with the over arching architecture. Big swaths of the code are likely fairly similar as they fill out particular structures mostly with public field names, or even in the cases of non public fields the verbose NT naming convention would lend a reasonably high probability of name collisions in the undocumented parts.

Finally, if anything the two black binders full of internal secrets actually seem a bit weak. Looking at the long untouched part of my bookshelf with NT documentation, I have probably two feet of books not published by MS that are either entirely dedicated to reverse engineering, or are targeted towards driver writers looking to expand upon the official microsoft documentation. Including a black binder about half the size of the pictured one with various magazine articles, internet articles, etc I printed and bound during that two and a half years of my life.

Lastly, given I've spun up reactos a few times in a VM, I don't think MS has anything to worry about. I would love an opensource win2k clone, but its frankly no where near done. Some thing work really well, but many things simply don't work at all, or the thing crashes. Last time I ran it, the image ate itself. I'm also guessing more than 1/2 the work is being done by the wine project as they re-implement the userspace side of things, the core NT kernel simply wasn't that big in the win2k timeframe. If reactos had 1% of the developer effort that the linux kernel+core subsystems (systemd, dbus, etc) gets it would be a near perfect clone by now. After all MS wrote the thing in 5 years? (Cutler joined MS in '88, and NT 3.1 was released in '93).

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

#259
post #170
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain what is MS LCA?

non existent - they are called by a different name in MS (and also have clear guidance for things like this, which was not broken)

Used to be LCA. Now CELA. I left in 2009.

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

#260

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…

Microsoft complaining about ripped off source code?

You are the blackest pot in the history of computer software.

https://www.geek.com/news/microsoft-uses-open-source-code-54...

https://lwn.net/Articles/245805/

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