Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has been a supporter of open source lately anyway.

no sane org would touch this with a 10 foot pole

But with some clean room due diligence this could be a boon to WINE.

There have been a lot of leaks over the years. W2K and NT4 got leaked in 2004, XP in 2020 [1], and that's just the publicly known leaks where stuff ended on the 'chan boards or torrent sites. It's more than likely that there have been more leaks (e.g. from one of the academia or government audit programs) that have never been widely dispersed.

And yet, both WINE and ReactOS have refused to use the leaks; ReactOS doesn't even allow people who have worked legitimately at MS in the past to be developers, simply because even the smell of contamination would expose the projects to enormous legal risks.

The only way I could imagine these leaks being useful is by "parallel construction" aka by comparing the source code with actual Windows binaries and then the WINE/ReactOS code to spot out differences to check, and then have a second person investigate the differences with only the note "check function XYZ with implementation in current Windows binary". But that's a lot of effort for very low reward, not to mention you'd need at least two very skilled experts and the low-hanging fruits having been picked already long ago.

[1] https://borncity.com/win/2020/10/01/entwickler-compiliert-wi...

[2] https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20189

all you have to do is run it through an "AI" and then what comes out is definitely not a derivative work and you can legally use it however you like. Microsoft is very confident in this; just see Copilot.

And it would even be open-source copyleft [0] because the "AI" can't claim it's copyright either! Check mate patent trolls

yeah, if they somehow manage to remove the original data, would copyleft be able to "remember" the idea of the code so that if we try to recreate it, would we be able to without modifying the copilot to prevent this?

It'd be interesting to see (and likely public interest) to have some good analysis done of Microsofts telemetry. eg anything untoward in there, apart from just the forced telemetry itself

and does not matter if they like it or not /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com