Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "ReactOS" in Portuguese language version.
BV: You guys have certainly contributed a lot of your work back to Wine, including some of the utilities you've written. For instance, the task manager was recently ported from ReactOS.
To protect against charges of having simply (and illegally) copied IBM's BIOS, Phoenix reverse-engineered it using what's called a ‘clean room’, or ‘Chinese wall’, approach. First, a team of engineers studied the IBM BIOS—about 8KB of code—and described everything it did as completely as possible without using or referencing any actual code. Then Phoenix brought in a second team of programmers who had no prior knowledge of the IBM BIOS and had never seen its code. Working only from the first team's functional specifications, the second team wrote a new BIOS that operated as specified.
For those who wish to write such software, or to create portable applications that they may wish to later migrate to other platforms, it is essential to be able to target a clean and generic reference implementation of the Microsoft framework, freed from secret and undocumented behaviors.
Microsoft offers no such thing today — besides the lack of proper interface documentation, many of their own development tools depend on and offer libraries which use undocumented or secret API calls that are then built into applications. This is well illustrated in the difficulty Wine has with running applications, even those that were created purely within ‘standard’ Microsoft development tools and not using odd behaviors or undocumented functions on their own.
We can think of ReactOS, then, as the ‘Microsoft Windows documentation project’.
(…) ReactOS aims to run actual Windows binary executable programs. This means that ReactOS must implement the entire Windows environment. Functions must do exactly what their Windows counterparts would do. In other words, like our notional parallel stew recipes, ReactOS and Windows should be functionally identical. In order to avoid copyright prosecution, though, ReactOS must be expressly completely distinct and non-derivative from Windows. This is a careful tightrope walk! ReactOS is a free, clean room re-implemented drop-in replacement for Windows. So, consider this, especially regarding extremely simple library calls: is it legal for ReactOS to produce identical binary code to Windows?
The ReactOS and Haiku projects have had a friendly working relationship for several years now, with each group helping the other whenever possible.
(…) dirty room reverse engineering should be done in conjunction with clean room development by using two physically and electronically isolated teams where one team does dirty room reverse engineering and the other does clean room development. If a dirty room team exists, the clean room engineers can write a description of the portion of the specification that needs elaboration or clarification. The dirty room engineers then use that request to create additional functional specifications or tests.
ReactOS is an effort to re-create the WindowsNT platform, in an open source sense (GPL). The team works towards source compatibility with NT's applications and drivers by re-creating the Microsoft APIs.
The ReactOS team has suspended development to do a code review amid concerns that stolen code from the world's most used OS found its way into the project.
(…) this is still a very early alpha version. The developers do not claim it is stable or the ability to operate as your main OS and clearly state it is ‘recommended only for evaluation and testing purposes’.
(…)
While the main core of ReactOS is built from scratch, it has some dependencies on existing software and protocols. It uses parts of Wine, networking in the form of lwIP, USB from Haiku, as well as FreeType, Mesa3D, and UniATA.
Sometimes in the past, I didn't understand some changes, because the code didn't make sense for the current state of reactos and was not used. Currently, I've compared disassembled code from win2k and winxp with ReactOS. In my opinion, some of the developers do disassemble windows code to implement ReactOS.
Efforts to port ReactOS to the ARM anc x64 architectures are also under way, with both projects being able to initialise the first few parts of the operating system.
With software specifically leaving NT5 behind, ReactOS is expanding its target to support NT6+ (Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10) software
Now as for the issue of leaked source code, I want to try to put all fears to rest. We don't know what the legal ramifications are for someone downloading and having leaked code, as the party that maintains copyright ownership of that code might still try to claim Trade Secrecy on information contained in the sources in a court of law. It is our point of view that the source code leaks of Windows have been spread to a broad enough audience that it would be impossible to claim the product is still under Trade Secrecy.
With software specifically leaving NT5 behind, ReactOS is expanding its target to support NT6+ (Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10) software
For those who wish to write such software, or to create portable applications that they may wish to later migrate to other platforms, it is essential to be able to target a clean and generic reference implementation of the Microsoft framework, freed from secret and undocumented behaviors.
Microsoft offers no such thing today — besides the lack of proper interface documentation, many of their own development tools depend on and offer libraries which use undocumented or secret API calls that are then built into applications. This is well illustrated in the difficulty Wine has with running applications, even those that were created purely within ‘standard’ Microsoft development tools and not using odd behaviors or undocumented functions on their own.
We can think of ReactOS, then, as the ‘Microsoft Windows documentation project’.
(…) this is still a very early alpha version. The developers do not claim it is stable or the ability to operate as your main OS and clearly state it is ‘recommended only for evaluation and testing purposes’.
(…)
While the main core of ReactOS is built from scratch, it has some dependencies on existing software and protocols. It uses parts of Wine, networking in the form of lwIP, USB from Haiku, as well as FreeType, Mesa3D, and UniATA.
Efforts to port ReactOS to the ARM anc x64 architectures are also under way, with both projects being able to initialise the first few parts of the operating system.
The ReactOS and Haiku projects have had a friendly working relationship for several years now, with each group helping the other whenever possible.
BV: Wine and ReactOS have had a mutually beneficial relationship. (…) BV: You guys have certainly contributed a lot of your work back to Wine, including some of the utilities you've written. For instance, the task manager was recently ported from ReactOS. Do you guys have any plans in the works for developing more tools? Steven: I really want to see a solitaire clone make it in to Wine and ReactOS. (…) At some point we are going to have to develop replacement components for everything in Windows so if there is a program that Wine needs and ReactOS implements it then I will try to make sure it's released under a compatible license.
ReactOS is an effort to re-create the WindowsNT platform, in an open source sense (GPL). The team works towards source compatibility with NT's applications and drivers by re-creating the Microsoft APIs.
(…) ReactOS aims to run actual Windows binary executable programs. This means that ReactOS must implement the entire Windows environment. Functions must do exactly what their Windows counterparts would do. In other words, like our notional parallel stew recipes, ReactOS and Windows should be functionally identical. In order to avoid copyright prosecution, though, ReactOS must be expressly completely distinct and non-derivative from Windows. This is a careful tightrope walk! ReactOS is a free, clean room re-implemented drop-in replacement for Windows. So, consider this, especially regarding extremely simple library calls: is it legal for ReactOS to produce identical binary code to Windows?
Sometimes in the past, I didn't understand some changes, because the code didn't make sense for the current state of reactos and was not used. Currently, I've compared disassembled code from win2k and winxp with ReactOS. In my opinion, some of the developers do disassemble windows code to implement ReactOS.
The ReactOS team has suspended development to do a code review amid concerns that stolen code from the world's most used OS found its way into the project.
To protect against charges of having simply (and illegally) copied IBM's BIOS, Phoenix reverse-engineered it using what's called a ‘clean room’, or ‘Chinese wall’, approach. First, a team of engineers studied the IBM BIOS—about 8KB of code—and described everything it did as completely as possible without using or referencing any actual code. Then Phoenix brought in a second team of programmers who had no prior knowledge of the IBM BIOS and had never seen its code. Working only from the first team's functional specifications, the second team wrote a new BIOS that operated as specified.
(…) dirty room reverse engineering should be done in conjunction with clean room development by using two physically and electronically isolated teams where one team does dirty room reverse engineering and the other does clean room development. If a dirty room team exists, the clean room engineers can write a description of the portion of the specification that needs elaboration or clarification. The dirty room engineers then use that request to create additional functional specifications or tests.
Now as for the issue of leaked source code, I want to try to put all fears to rest. We don't know what the legal ramifications are for someone downloading and having leaked code, as the party that maintains copyright ownership of that code might still try to claim Trade Secrecy on information contained in the sources in a court of law. It is our point of view that the source code leaks of Windows have been spread to a broad enough audience that it would be impossible to claim the product is still under Trade Secrecy.
BV: Wine and ReactOS have had a mutually beneficial relationship. (…) BV: You guys have certainly contributed a lot of your work back to Wine, including some of the utilities you've written. For instance, the task manager was recently ported from ReactOS. Do you guys have any plans in the works for developing more tools? Steven: I really want to see a solitaire clone make it in to Wine and ReactOS. (…) At some point we are going to have to develop replacement components for everything in Windows so if there is a program that Wine needs and ReactOS implements it then I will try to make sure it's released under a compatible license.
BV: You guys have certainly contributed a lot of your work back to Wine, including some of the utilities you've written. For instance, the task manager was recently ported from ReactOS.
