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 you have extraordinary evidence, fair enough, otherwise you should STFU.
Update: my original comment was refering to the author's original answer, which didn't give a single symbol name. But apparently, the author registered an HN comment and start giving more details than what has been said in the original answer, I need to stick to the facts so I'd say the credibility of the accusation is no longer 100% "baseless". Let's see what is going to be the evidence.
It’s my personal opinion and it’s based on my lecture of ReactOS code at the time I downloaded it (circa when I wrote my reply on Quora). I think anyone who can read C code can reach similar conclusions just by eyeballing the code in ReactOS and the code from the leaked Research Kernel, that can be found for example on GitHub. As a matter fact, someone on this thread did just that and it did not take that person very long (just minutes) to find some of the similarities that I, for one, qualify as troubling. It should not be a problem for anyone to repeat the experiment, all code is available for download. So why not go ahead and see that code with your own eyes? I think it’s highly improbable that a reimplementation of that magnitude came so close from the original in so many respects. I’ve been conducting interviews for years and screened some of the best and most promising future engineers coming from the best universities and I always ask the same coding questions. I was given many decent and correct answers, but never the actual implementation was similar to the level I can observe between ReactOS and the leaked Microsoft code. In fact every candidate wrote very different answers to the very same question, some even had very different approaches to the resolution of the same problems. I cannot explain how a team of people on a hyper-complex open source project can write nearly the same code - the source code looks very similar down to peculiar formatting idiosyncrasies - as a separate team of developers of the original closed-source project, just from observing the external behavior and/or reading the documentation, if available at all. I think this is impossible.
>and it’s based on my lecture of ReactOS code at the time I downloaded it
It would be interesting to see if this statement comes back to bite you in court if the opposite accusation is ever made. That Windows kernel developers have been stealing from GPL code :)
Man, I thought the exact same thing. I must have stolen it from you. Sorry!
In all seriousness is this normal? I write and work on kernel drivers for the company I work for and have always gone out of my way to not view or interact with any code that remotely relates to the work I do (out side of what I coded). Our competitor even released their version of a block device snapshot driver and while I would be tempted to see how they did things I have avoided it every step of the way.
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?
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.
GPL is absolutely incompatible with BSD licensing. The license does not allow for one to "rewrite" the same code into a BSD licensed driver.
Of course one could clean room reverse engineer the GPL driver and then give the spec to someone else to implement and create a BSD driver, that would probably be ok.
Not exactly incompatible, as you can license something under both of them at once. But yes, you cannot relicense it without permission from the contributors; this is true for pretty much any license.
Right, of course the rights holder can license under anything they want. But no one else can take GPL code and relicense it under BSD. The same is not true the other way -- anyone can use BSD code.
I presume you quit working on Windows after you read the ReactOS source code, offered to you under the GPL license only? Or is Microsoft planning to release it under a compatible license?
Your interview analogy is a bad one. Because they are not trying to make their solutions as similar as possible to each other.
If you had interviewee A write some piece of code, and then said to interviewee B "I want you to solve this problem as close as possible as the person before you did it, here is their executable", you'd be quite surprised what they could do. Especially if interviewee B is Alex Ionescu.
I don't suppose you ever compared parts of the tree that weren't present in the various sort-of-public NT source leaks or research kernel, to see if idiosyncrasies there matched as well?
Others in the thread have pointed out several verifiably false fact claims in it, so it's both derogatory and at least in part factually false, not a mere matter of subjective opinion.
Saying "like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant" is not a defamation. It's a metaphor. He's saying that the project doesn't really threaten Microsoft so they'll probably just ignore it.
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.
That would be enough to get an injunction and prohibit the software from being distributed in the US, which would deny a very important market for the developers.
Indeed, but as the world becomes less and less centered around the US, this effect will probably disappear soon: if a product is originally developed for China, not being able to sell it in the US isn't an issue.
Update: my original comment was refering to the author's original answer, which didn't give a single symbol name. But apparently, the author registered an HN comment and start giving more details than what has been said in the original answer, I need to stick to the facts so I'd say the credibility of the accusation is no longer 100% "baseless". Let's see what is going to be the evidence.