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This is the day that Microsoft releases a product using FreeRDP, the reverse engineered implementation of their own RDP protocol...

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FreeRDP is not quite reverse engineered, the software built based on open specification for RDP[1]. That being said, I would be surprised if the FreeRDP contributors did not need Wireshark during development.

[1] https://winprotocoldoc.blob.core.windows.net/productionwindo...

Didn't FreeRDP start before Microsoft released that documentation?

Possibly? Initial commit on FreeRDP is from 2011 while the oldest version listed on Microsoft's website is v0.01 from 2007. Not sure if that version of the documentation was publicly available.

FreeRDP's roots are in rdesktop which was released in 2001

I don't get it why would they need to reverse engineer their own software? Was it some sort of RPC without an explicit protocol?

I guess they just decided the freerdp codebase (which already runs on Linux) was easier to work with than their codebase (which is deeply integrated into all things windows).

I think the original Microsoft codebase also uses stuff licensed from a third party, so it might have been impossible to opensource.

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