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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?”

#71

Post by segfaultbuserr »

bubblethink wrote: post #69
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>baseless defamation of ReactOS ("like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant") If only he had called it a cancer. That seems to work well generally.

The infamous "cancer" analogy was referring to the copyleft-licensing, not the actual system per se.

Saying ReactOS infringes 200+ Microsoft patents and threatening for lawsuits to developers and all users is a more effective FUD approach to me, and may even be factually true. The entire project of Linux kernel was running under this threat for 10+ years until ~2005 (?) when an agreement was established.

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

#72

Post by wildfire »

whereistimbo wrote: post #51
RachelF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also many of the .wav files in Windows 98SE were edited with a pirated version of Sony's Soundforge, the metadata in the media files contained the Soundforge cracker's name.

These .wav files might be made by person who works under Microsoft contract, not necessarily directly employed by Microsoft.

Which, of course, makes it perfectly acceptable?

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

#73

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

unstatusthequo wrote: post #48
rincebrain wrote: post #19

ReactOS 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

Don't we all think if the accusations were true, Microsoft would have aggressively persued legal action? Remember that guy they sued into oblivion and maybe prison over "rescue discs" for old PCs? Microsoft it notoriously sue happy. Why not here?

Because Nadella is trying hard to win the hearts of developers and attacking an open source project now like they did with Linux would backfire on them.

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

#74

Post by angersock »

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…

When MS finishes trashing Windows all of the legacy users will only have ReactOS and WINE to fall back on.

Frankly, they're doing a great service to the world, and maybe you should help instead of taking potshots.

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

#75

Post by fiblye »

jchw wrote: post #22
thom_nic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, and since the author of this answer provided links to what they called leaks [1], it's not difficult to download both the leak and ReactOS source [2] and look for similarities. So, out of curiosity, that's what I did. I started poking at some source files at random in ntoskernel, and it only took a minute to get some "hits" from the ReactOS source: $ rg InitializeContextThread ./ntoskrnl/ke/thrdobj.c:8…

I do not wish to view the leaked copies of Windows source code, unfortunately. It does have potential legal ramifications, in the United States. If someone who doesn't care can attempt to audit it, that would be absolutely great. That said, KiInitializeContextThread isn't 'secret' enough to not appear, it is a well-known bit of internals. Here you can find some docs about it on Microsoft's own website, albeit I have…

If Microsoft cared, they wouldn’t be hosting that on their very own servers.

GitHub belongs to Microsoft. They could pull that down at any time just because they feel like it. But they haven’t. That’s a pretty solid sign that there’s not any legal consequence to viewing it.

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

#76

Post by riffraff »

unstatusthequo wrote: post #48
rincebrain wrote: post #19

ReactOS 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

Don't we all think if the accusations were true, Microsoft would have aggressively persued legal action? Remember that guy they sued into oblivion and maybe prison over "rescue discs" for old PCs? Microsoft it notoriously sue happy. Why not here?

Because reactos is irrelevant to Microsoft?

The project has been around for 20 years, it's not likely to cause MSFT to lose any revenue any time soon, and there is no large corporation to extract money from in a lawsuit.

It's basically the same reason they don't go after people who have a pirated version of Windows and just show them a "this is fake" warning.

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

#77

Post by acqq »

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…

> 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 optimizations, allowing for easier reversing. Such events of releasing the internal names resulted in some very interesting stories and statements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

"_NSAKEY was a variable name discovered in Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 (which had been released unstripped of its symbolic debugging data) in August 1999 by Andrew D. Fernandes of Cryptonym Corporation."

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

#78

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

zyang wrote: post #47
discordance wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the attitude more interesting.. on one side we have Linux embedded in Windows, more Linux VMs on Azure than Windows Server, MS employees proudly brandishing shirts with 'I heart Linux' and 'I heart OSS' and on the other side we have Windows Kernal developers saying their ideas were stolen. Maybe it's a sign of the relationship between Azure and Windows teams?

I interned at Microsoft in late 2000's. The sales engineers had an "anti oss" budget. Many of these guys still work at Microsoft today, now "hearts" open source and linux...

They have no choice, Linux already won big time on the server, so the only way was to embrace it in a way that would bring them money. And they succeeded big time. Now most young developers don't remember all the dirty tactics used year after year by MS to kill all competition, whether commercial or open source.

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

#79

Post by riffraff »

Analemma_ wrote: post #4

I always heard that ReactOS had an ultra-strict vetting process, where no one who had ever so much as been within spitting distance of Redmond at some point in their life was allowed to touch the code, to support their claim of a clean-room implementation in case Microsoft ever decided to make a fuss about it. Seems like a lot of pointless effort if they actually did use leaks or university kernel releases. So either…

Why not consider the alternative that the process is just inherently flawed? (As in, it has flaws, even if its intent is good)

If I look at some leaked source code, then contribute to your project, you can't know the code is stolen unless you also look at it, which you can't do.

You can reasonably guess if a large chunk looks "unusual" but it can't ever be perfect.

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

#80

Post by StudentStuff »

jchw wrote: post #67
jimueller wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going to throw this out there, if Microsoft cared that anyone viewed it, wouldn't they have taken it down by now?

I don't think Microsoft cares that much, but I'm sure they view it for what it is: illegal, unauthorized usage of their intellectual property. (I'll hold off on my personal views of 'intellectual property' and whatnot; I'm not a lawyer, and those opinions are hardly relevant to the reality here.) Still, even if Microsoft doesn't care, Wine Project and ReactOS care. My employer might care. There are unfortunately lega…

What stops someone from viewing that repo over Tor, on a different git server, or at a public library, unsecured WiFi network, etc and being considered tainted? At what point is someone considered untainted?

This seems like a grey area that slows the pace of R&D in countries that believe code is copyrightable & patentable (the US and select Western countries) compared to say New Zealand & China, where these aren't an issue.

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