• TCB13@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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…

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      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?

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Otter@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          What are you talking about?

          Ah the term I was looking for was “clean room”

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

          See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        You can. Who can prove you read it? There’s copyright infringement that happens 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.

        • Possibly linux
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          10 months ago

          I am not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure your wrong entirely. The court will take one look at the code and then at the MS code and they will see the similarities.

          Under no circumstances can a developer of wine, proton or React os look at leaked code. That would be a major liability.

          • TCB13@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Under no circumstances can a developer of wine, proton or React os look at leaked code. That would be a major liability.

            Why? As long as there’s no copied code there’s no copyright infringement. Nobody can ever prove you had a look at some leaked source code.

            What you’re saying is mostly the reason why we still have compatibility issues in Wine.

            Anyways, do you really think that Microsoft is so worried about ethics and hypothetical copyright infringements as you seem to be? if they were they wouldn’t be what they are today… maybe that’s Linux desktop isn’t still a viable option? :)