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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

when it starts getting really good, Microsoft will probably sue it to the ground.

How's that? It's open source and they wrote the whole thing from scratch. Even if they abandon the project it's open source and work can continue even after MS has their way with them.

Microsoft has more budget for making coffee for the legal department than ReactOS has budget. Even if the lawsuit has no chance of prevailing, it still can force the ReactOS team to shut down. Oracle made a convincing enough case against Google about copying APIs, IIRC.

You forget about the bigger FOSS community goodwill that they've carefully been trying to cultivate in the past few years that they will throw away by doing that.

I don't think they value goodwill over protecting their core business.

this is the reason why I wrote "probably" and not "will"

They'll try to claim to have patents on key functions, API copyright like Oracle, or look and feel with either type of law. IBM destroyed a company that used Hercules emulator to replace its mainframes with compatibility or competition arguments attempted with failure. Oracle vs Google on API issue shows what can happen when big money gets thrown at lawyers. For patents, Microsoft collecting over a billion dollars on royalties from Android vendors and Apple blocking Samsung in Germany over look-and-feel are examples.

Anything trying to be compatible with a large, greedy company's software is a huge risk if it starts cutting into their profits. Maybe nothing will happen but something might happen. I'm more concerned for companies like EnterpriseDB than FOSS projects like ReactOS, though. The lawyers do prioritize on those making money with the competing software.

Honestly, I don't think we'd try to destroy ReactOS at all. Windows has stopped being a cash cow for us - recently, we've even started to disband the Windows org, moving the kernel to Azure etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if we open-sourced NT, at the rate things are going. Windows devs are likely flattered by ReactOS at this point.

You have a good point. They might just try to suck a lot of the money out of the businesses built on ReactOS like they do with Android. Then again, Android wasn't going to eliminate a lot of revenue from locked-in customers like ReactOS could. I say them forcing royalties is most probable outcome for now.

They've had problems in the past, based on the legitimacy of reverse engineering Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

> Even if they abandon the project it's open source and work can continue even after MS has their way with them.

Such infringement claims are damaging to the legitimacy of the codebase itself. Anyone taking up the project could face the same problems.

In Russia? Yeah, right... :D

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