It’s a miracle we have wine at all, reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy. Be grateful for what we have (which is already enough to run a ton of software really well)
Hasn’t ReactOS been accused of using code that was not reverse-engineered multiple times? If they became too big MS would probably just sue them.
From what I’ve heard they used some assembly code directly for very low level functions.
reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy
Have you noticed the the NT / Windows XP source code was leaked years ago. There’s isn’t much of a need to “reverse engineering”, it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…
Guess that rule was in place because some people would look at it and proceed to copy it. The rule should be “if you copy code from Microsoft you’ll be kicked from the project and the code removed”. While I see why this is place and what it protect the project from this is also a very big roadblock to the project’s evolution and a clear example of what’s wrong with it and why we still have compatibility issues.
it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…
That sounds difficult though. Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.
