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Comment by thrownaway954 | Hacker News Reader

everyone working on ReactOS must be drooling right now, though they can't even peek at the source without risk of going through another audit.

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Back in the day, IBM published technical documentation (and assembly source? It's been a while) on the 5150 Personal Computer BIOS. The first PC clone BIOSes were created by having a team re-document how the BIOS worked from IBM's docs, and then having an entirely separate team create new code from that documentation.

How useful would this technique be to the ReactOS and Wine teams? Are there things that they don't know how to make work correctly that this source leak could help them with?

They are doing this (clean room implementation) right now, and very-very-very thoroughly trying to avoid coming in contact with source code leaks in any shape or form: https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit

They were called red books ;) i loved reading through them even though i didn't know assembly and often the content was waaaaaaaay over my fragile little mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Redbooks

I learnt about this technique in Triumph of the Nerds[0] long time ago.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398

Is ReactOS allowed to read documentation written by people who read the source code?

It's dependent on the jurisdiction, but in the US: yes

someone please correct me if i'm wrong cause i'm going off of what i was told decades ago.

in reverse engineering there has to be an intermediate person. in other words, someone could read the source code and the documentation, however they CANNOT actually do the programming. They must write, IN THEIR OWN WORDS, steps and designs for the implementation of the feature and give it to someone else who then interprets and does the actual implementation. this is to ensure that anyone who question how the feature was implemented, they have documentation showing the steps and design of the feature.

again... i don't know what the laws and procedures are today as i'm going off of what i was told, so please someone correct me if i'm wrong.

The windows research kernel has been leaked for more than a decade. It's actually quite clear that ReactOS has been taking a look.

I have nothing to do with ReactOS, but I've heard this allegation made many times on HN, but I have yet to see anyone point to a hard example. Some of the allegations relate to symbol names, but Microsoft has leaked private symbol names in the past[1].

[1] https://kobyk.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/oops-microsoft-privat...

So just because some internal symbols have been leaked (or even have been published by MS in symbols tables) you can copy them legally ? But somehow you can't copy the source code ? But however you can copy a hand (or tool assisted) disassembly and even copy the symbols on top of that ??? Why ? What kind of crazy interpretation of copyright law is that ? (And this is tremendously clear at least something like that has been done for some key parts, and some of the people even told the world they believe this was OK because they did it basically like that...). And oh, maybe in some jurisdiction you actually can, but I would like to have the list. And in the US, especially after Oracle vs. Google I would be astonished to learn that this is actually legal, and I would actually already have been astonished to learn this is legal even before Oracle vs. Google.

Win 2k and NT4 sources have had a very very wide circulation for a long time. Probably there was no source copy directly at source level because they magically audited their codebase, somehow, and told us that this did not happen, BUT it at least means that it's easy for anybody not wanting to take the handwaving at face value to directly do a comparison themselves. And no magical process is going to produce virtually the same functions, including the internals, suddenly not a copyright violation, because of some random wishful thinking about how if you copy with some crazy extra steps and a cute little magical dance in the middle it becomes suddenly ok in the eye of the law. Maybe that idea would make lawyers laugh hysterically while randomly saying "AFC test", but I'm not it would have any other effect.

Just take the two trees and diff key functions and see by yourself. There is no way to justify it can't be reimplemented differently to implement even the same specification. Would MS want to destroy that project, I believe they would be able to do it, effortlessly, in a court. But I suspect it is not worth the potential PR backslash given how the narrative is already set that it is "clean", and the high number of free software enthusiasts believing it blindly for years without even checking by themselves.

Copyright has a creativity threshold, symbols might easily not pass it, they are only unique, and creations that are merely unique, are not copyrightable.

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