Posted on Thursday, July 04 2019 @ 10:42 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The ReactOS open-source project is a free operating system that aims to be binary-compatible with software and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later. The operating system has been under development since 1996 but is still in alpha status.
"I think it's a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities under an agreement that was obviously violated by some, as the code has been uploaded to numerous places, some of it on GitHub.Now that the news received more global attention, Rietschin backed up his old claims with more information over at HackerNews. He notes it only takes a couple of minutes to find similarities in the code that are extremely hard to explain. This includes parameters, macros, and functions with exactly the same name as in the original, line-by-line correlation, as well as code hacks that are exactly the same:
"I glanced at the ReactOS code tree, and in my opinion, there is absolutely no way on Earth this was written from a clean sheet only from the available public documentation," Rietschin wrote.
Funnily, I had a conversation with a very seasoned kernel engineer (I report directly to him) about ReactOS and my Quora reply. He told me the team looked into ReactOS some time ago and reached the exact same conclusions: impossible.
In particular, this person distinctly remembers a hack he implemented (I’m not going to reveal any details, but suffice to say it was in response to some assertion by some 3rd parties that something Microsoft declared in a court of law as very difficult). He explained the hack to me in full details and, boy, hacky that was, and they found the same hack in ReactOS’s code, except that the présumer authors of that “clean room” implementation probably have no idea regarding why the hack was there.
