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Comment by crb | Hacker News Reader

The way Microsoft is moving, it's feasible to think that Windows 2000/XP will be open sourced before ReactOS is finished.

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There probably is a huge amount of code inside Windows that Microsoft has a license to use, but no right to open.

If they cared they'd try something like what OpenSolaris did (file-based GPL alternative so they could have copyleft on code but still ship binaries). I'm not advocating for another viral license but there are definitely ways around that problem. MS itself already did it in part once (WRK) so they clearly have looked into it at least once before.

This is bang-on what MPL 2.0 is for

Yes, like old OS/2 code.

That's probably the best part of Windows.

Has MS-DOS been open-sourced yet?

Yep. https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

Wasn't the code for XP leaked a while ago? Could the ReactOS developers learn how things work from it?

Quite the opposite, any developer that so much as glances at the leaked source code is banned from the project. The legality of ReactOS rests upon its developers reverse engineering Windows without having access to the source code.

As far as I'm aware you can however look at the leaked source code and use those insights to fix or write documentation about the behavior of the APIs and general behavior. You just can't write any ReactOS code yourself because you are tained once you've seen the leak. But I think the overlap between people who can extract insights from the leaked code and people who enjoy writing documentation in their free time (more than reverse engineering and programming) is pretty small.

> As far as I'm aware you can however look at the leaked source code and use those insights to fix

You can, but if your solution is at all like theirs the onus will be on you (what-ever legal team you can afford against their 800lb gorilla) to prove that you didn't copy it.

It is far safer not to look at all, and IIRC ReactOS's developer guidelines prohibit their devs from doing so for the avoidance of doubt.

> or write documentation about the behavior of the APIs and general behavior.

What Compaq did to implement the behaviour of IBM's BIOS (the only part of the original PC that wasn't off-the-shelf) was to double-clean-room. Two completely separate teams were on the job: in one "clean room" they analysed the chip's behaviour in detail and documented everything significant, and in the other a team implemented a design that mimicked said behaviour.

I doubt the ReactOS team have the resources to properly pull this off for something as large as the Windows source code though, and even if they did that still wouldn't get close to their target of Win2003 & later compatibility (there have been some significant changes to parts of the driver model since the XP days).

I forget the details, but generally, no. They want a clean room implementation, so if you've seen the code, you might even unconsciously copy it. They've taken license matters very seriously, so ReactOS devs would probably actively avoid looking at the code for the legal safety of the project.

Maybe they could do something like Drew DeVault did with their TrueCraft project: https://github.com/ddevault/TrueCraft#get-involved

If you're asking if they are formally allowed to do it, the answer is definitely no.

If though, you're asking if they "can" in very generic terms, yes, certainly - as a matter of fact, this has been a large controversy of ReactOS.

There are no certainties, as everybody has their own side of the story. An MS developer, Axel Rietschin, publicly expressed his opinion that there are wholesale ripped off (low-level) functionalities¹; I personally find it convincing, although it's fuzzy, as he doesn't give details.

¹=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341933

This talk was posted in that thread https://youtu.be/2D9ExVc0G10

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