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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Instead of exposing students to Windows kernel code[1], it would be better to consider to read the ReactOS source code - an open source clean room re-implementation:

http://www.reactos.org

[1] signing such an NDA will prevent them from contributing to various open source projects, that would be a shame.

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There is no single NDA, all NDAs are different. The NDAs I've managed to negotiate regarding this issue have no such clauses.

That being said, you are right that this is a valid concern and people should be careful.

Over at the Wine project, we forbid contributions from anyone known to have looked at Windows source code or even done significant "white box" reverse-engineering (decompiling, etc). The intellectual property law landscape is far too frightening to be worth the risk of allowing contributions from "tainted" individuals.

Statements like these are "legally reassuring" but it's very likely that you can get the same functionality but implemented very differently even if you looked at Windows' code. In the end it's probably another thing like piracy: everyone does it, but few would admit.

I had the impression that the Win2000 code he's talking about was the leaked source code.

I didn't know the Microsoft source NDA was so evil though; good warning. :)

Microsoft have been making their source code available to academia to study for at least a decade.

Yes, this program started a long time ago.

Unfortunately, I was under the impression that it stopped not so long ago (~1year)?

Also read the "Inside Windows" book series, they are full of valuable information.

Do you know the author or have a link to the book?

The original author was Mark E. Russinovich from "Sysinternals fame", nowadays other developers continue the new editions.

http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Edition-Developer-Re...

Additionally the books for user mode programming from Jeffrey Richter and Charles Petzold tend to be quite good and full of valuable information as well.

Thank you.

A NDA'd operating systems course where you had to submit to Microsoft, I'd love to see the headlines...

Is the ReactOS kernel clean?

Read the comment above by coldpie about WineHQ project. The same is true for the ReactOS project.

In 2006, an overenthusiastic contributor caused troubles. The aftermath slash back the project for several months and stressed the relationship with Wine for some time. Since then, every possible effort is made to keep the code clean and disallow tainted developers. (that's why I wrote the comment above, to warn others) You can read a short summary on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

Yes, it is clean 100%

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