Comment by rs23296008n1
7 years ago
It would be interesting to see this engineer's statements tested in court. Microsoft are highly motivated to protect their source code so there would have to be a reason why they haven't. ReactOS is definitely NOT a mosquito to an elephant in violation terms if this engineers comments have validity. I'm thinking patents, copyrights etc.
The fact that Microsoft haven't acted for all this time is by itself evidence that could be interesting to present.
Contrast this with another chunk of law in trademarks where ignoring use and not challenging it strengthens someone elses laches defense.
(Usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer so these words are likely just words assembled by 400000 chimps for bananas)
I find the attitude more interesting.. on one side we have Linux embedded in Windows, more Linux VMs on Azure than Windows Server, MS employees proudly brandishing shirts with 'I heart Linux' and 'I heart OSS' and on the other side we have Windows Kernal developers saying their ideas were stolen.
Maybe it's a sign of the relationship between Azure and Windows teams?
I interned at Microsoft in late 2000's. The sales engineers had an "anti oss" budget. Many of these guys still work at Microsoft today, now "hearts" open source and linux...
Microsoft did try to hijack LinuxFest Northwest a few years ago, taking over half the event space, sponsoring the event and providing the afterparties (which were tightly controlled, compared to prior/following years where any LFNW attendee could just show up).
Multiple people I know stopped attending LFNW that year, and will not return. Hopefully other conferences like SeaGL don't fall for the Microsoft embrace scam, as it injured LFNW pretty badly.
They have no choice, Linux already won big time on the server, so the only way was to embrace it in a way that would bring them money. And they succeeded big time. Now most young developers don't remember all the dirty tactics used year after year by MS to kill all competition, whether commercial or open source.
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> Windows Kernal developers
Windows Kernel. To me best knowledge, Windows was never ported to Commodore 64 ;-)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL
The comment is from one dude in late 2017 - it probably doesn't mean shit.
Like dude is talking about "there is absolutely no way on earth this was written from a clean sheet only from the available public documentation.", but that's not the bar for reverse engineering systems. It is legal (if you do it right anyways) to examine, use, and disassemble software in the process of reverse engineering.
What about EULA then? I know in some cases it is not enforceable, but I think it might apply in case of reverse engineering.
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This is the first sensible comment in here. A lot of jumping to conclusions.
Big companies are hardly ever coherent, let alone after a big pivot like Nadella’s.
The two things are also not exclusive: it might well be that MS “loves OSS” and that the ReactOS kernel was lifted wholesale from a Windows leak.
Besides, there are many who think projects like ReactOS or Mono are actually a net negative for the FOSS ecosystem, since they reduce the pressure on developers to switch away from Windows-based stacks.
How are these two things related at all? I use Linux too but would be highly annoyed if someone stole my car. Are you implying that Linux users are in some way "stealing" from the Linux authors?