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by David Eckert

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18 years, 8 months

Reset, Reboot, Restart, legal issues and the long road to 0.3

by Steven Edwards

Hello, There has been a lot of talk about possible tainted code in ReactOS and or developers that had access to leaked Microsoft source code. This has caused a lot of speculation about the future of the ReactOS Project. I'm going to try to put those fears to rest and explain what has been going on and where we are going to go from here. There was one issue that started this discussion and it related to clean-room reverse engineering of certain code in ReactOS. Due to the fact we have developers in many different countries the term reverse engineering can mean many things to many different people. For us in the US when you speak of clean-room reverse engineering it means that one person tears apart the implementation of a device, writes documentation and another reads that documentation and implements. Other countries do not require this invisible great wall of development and allow the same person that disassembles the interface to also write the replacement implementation. Because of the confusion this has caused and the possible legal issues this could lead to we have decided to do the following. 1) Amend our Intellectual Property Policy Statement to reflect clean-room reverse engineering as meaning the US standard method for reverse engineering and make that the project requirement 2) Audit the entire source tree and rewrite all code found to have been implemented not using the US method for reverse Engineering 3) Require all developers contributing major code to accept the terms of our IP Policy Document via signature. Now as for the issue of leaked source code, I want to try to put all fears to rest. We don't know what the legal ramifications are for someone downloading and having leaked code, as the party that maintains copyright ownership of that code might still try to claim Trade Secrecy on information contained in the sources in a court of law. It is our point of view that the source code leaks of Windows have been spread to a broad enough audience that it would be impossible to claim the product is still under Trade Secrecy. Because of this we are not banning any developer who might have had access to leaked sources from contributing to ReactOS, however they are being limited as to what area they can contribute. Copyright law still applies to all leaked Windows sources and no one in ReactOS may copy code from a Windows source leak and try to apply it to code in the ReactOS tree. We know of four developers who have had access to leaked sources prior to working on ReactOS and while they no longer have copies of the source code in question, each of the developers have told us in private which sections of the sources they were exposed to. As such the project has amending the IP document as a fourth step of protection 4) any developer that had access to leaked sources is baned from contributing code to the project for any of the modules that are the same as leaked sources they examined. So to clarify that, lets say someone saw some of the leaked Windows source code in version.dll, then they would be unable to contribute code to the ReactOS project for that dll. It is our hope that a court case will arise and declare Microsoft's Windows code is no longer under Trade Secret protection so these developers who did have access to some of the leaked sources will be free to contribute again to all sections of the project. One final note, this audit of the code is going to take a long time. It could take years, but it will happen, this project will come out better than it was before. I don't believe anything anyone has done while working on this project was really wrong. Every decision has three possibilities, being moral, ethical and or legal. Sometimes the law in itself is unethical and immoral. If people made mistakes and there was a violation of the law, I question the justice of the law and or anyone that would try to prosecute any of the developers who just want the freedom to learn and create a more free system. -- Steven Edwards - ReactOS and Wine developer "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

18 years, 8 months

ReactOS Project Status

by Steven Edwards

Hello, Sorry for this general email. I have gotten many personal emails about the current situation and cannot reply to all of them. In short here is the deal: There have been allegations about possible copyright and trade secret violations in the ReactOS Project. Pending a discussion with legal council, those members with SVN access who were part of private discussion and online on IRC on Tuesday Jan 24th 2006 decided by majority vote to suspend operations of public SVN, forum, discussion and email archive. Anyone with SVN write access who might have missed any of the discussion is asked to try to be on IRC today at 3PM EST (-5GMT). We are going to discuss the matter further and decide how to proceed. What started out as a question about development methods mushroomed in to a much larger issue. The question the looms before us is a simple one. If one or more developers had at any leaked source code in the past, does it taint us and the entire project in the future? It is my point of view based on the AT&T Unix case that it does not however IANAL. It is my hope the matter can be solved via a simple set of changes in our IP Policy as well as sworn affidavits by major contributors stating they do not have access to leaked sources and if they ever did, no longer possess them. Rest assured that the project will live on. Every developer I have spoken with wants the project to survive and be a success. In the meantime we are filtering email discussion on this matter because we do not want rumor and hearsay to be spread. When the time comes and we have proper legal advice we will move forward. No one is trying to hide the truth, but law regarding Copyright, Trade Secret, Patent, etc differ from one country to another and we are currently exploring what US law says regarding the situation. One final note, no one is denying that mistakes could have been made and or trying to hide it forever and pretend there is nothing going on. We just simply do not want people to be accused of breaking the law if they really did not. There is clearly some violation of our current IP policy, however depending on what the legal council suggests we will see how we move forward. Many of the core developers at some point have either violated small sections of it by mistake or prior to its ratification. -- Steven Edwards - ReactOS and Wine developer "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

18 years, 8 months

RE: [ros-dev] Reset, Reboot, Restart, legal issues and the long road to 0.3

by jonwil＠tpgi.com.au

IANAL but from what I understand, there are 2 issues with using the leaked source code. The first is that it is (C) Microsoft. This can be handled like any other copyrighted material. The second is that it could be considered a trade secret. I dont know that much about trade secret law but AFAIK once something is widely distributed (like the MS 2000 & NT4 source leaks are), it cant be considered a trade secret anymore. I think that what the ReactOS team needs need is for a lawyer skilled in the area of trade secret law to answer the question as to whether the leaked MS source code is still a trade secret or not. (although unless an actual lawsuit happens that provides a usable precedent either with the leaked MS source code or a similar leak elsewhere, getting clear usable advice one way or the other might not be possible) If it is not, there is no problem with people who have seen it contributing to any part of ReactOS (as long as there is no copyright violation). If it is, then there is need to be more careful about people who have seen it contributing. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .

18 years, 8 months

Best wishes for a fresh start

by Thomas Weidenmueller

Hey devs, I hope the new rules we established will prevent something similar in the future and I really hope this project will one day succeed. It's not going to be an easy task, but it can be done. I wish you all best luck to succeed. However, the amount of effort more or less wasted, and personal reasons made me decide that it's better for me to step back for now until ReactOS some day reaches this point of maturity again. I basically don't have the resources and energy to devote so much time, again. Re-inventing the wheel already is controversial, but I personally can't do it yet another time. I've met many very talented people ever since I joined almost three years ago, so it's very sad for me to leave most of this behind. Even though there were disagreements occasionally, it was great fun for me to collaborate and create something unique and outstanding. However, I'm going to try to stay in touch at least. I encourage everyone to stay if somehow possible and rebuild ReactOS! Thanks for everything that was done for me and the countless hours of fun I had with this project. Best Regards, Thomas

18 years, 8 months

NTVFS from Samba 4.0TP

by Rick Langschultz

I was wondering if NTVFS from the Samba 4.0TP would be able to be integrated with ReactOS? This might add some support for NTFS over Fat32 or like file systems...

18 years, 8 months

svn: No access allowed to this repository

by Reuben Perelman

What's going on with subversion?

18 years, 8 months

ROS 21010: KMODE on start of installer

by Reuben Perelman

I'm getting a KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED on bootup of ROS 21010 on QEMU. Technical information: ***STOP: 0x0000001E (0xc0000005,0x7c90b49,0x0000000,0x0000000) Page Fault Exception: 14(0) Processor: 0 CS:EIP 1b:7c907b49 cr2 0 cr3 567000 Proc: 009a02a0 DS 23 ES 23 FS 3v GS - EAX: 00000000 EBX: 0000001 ECX: 0000002 EDX: 00000003 EBP: 0000000 ESI: 0000008 NTDDK: Pageable code called at IRQL > APC_LEVEL (31) Assertion 'FALSE' failed at ./ntoskrnl/ob/handle.c line 888

18 years, 8 months

Another NDIS bug fix.

by Jerry

Inproved the implimentation of NdisWriteConfiguration(), by Crashfourit. Index: drivers/net/ndis/ndis/config.c =================================================================== --- drivers/net/ndis/ndis/config.c (revision 21005) +++ drivers/net/ndis/ndis/config.c (working copy) @@ -66,6 +66,18 @@ ULONG ParameterType = ParameterValue->ParameterType; ULONG DataSize; PVOID Data; + + /* + The next few lines of code before teh first if statement are used when + ParameterType equals NdisParameterHexInteger or NdisParameterInteger. + This is done so that Buff can be used beyond the switch statement. + */ + UNICODE_STRING buff; + WCHAR str[25]; + + Buff->Length=0; + Buff->MaximumLength = sizeof(str) / sizeof(str[0]); + Buff->Buffer=str; if(ParameterType != NdisParameterInteger && ParameterType != NdisParameterHexInteger && @@ -81,12 +93,29 @@ /* reset parameter type to standard reg types */ switch(ParameterType) { - /* TODO: figure out what do do with these; are they different? */ + /* + TODO: figure out what do do with these; are they different? + Done by Crashfourit + */ case NdisParameterHexInteger: - case NdisParameterInteger: - ParameterType = REG_SZ; - Data = &ParameterValue->ParameterData.IntegerData; - DataSize = sizeof(ULONG); + case NdisParameterInteger: + { + if (!NT_SUCCESS(RtlIntegerToUnicodeString( + ParameterValue->ParameterData.IntegerData, + ( ParameterType == NdisParameterHexInteger ) ? 16 : 10, + &buff)) + ) + { + *Status = NDIS_STATUS_FAILURE; + return; + } + else + { + ParameterType = REG_SZ; + Data = &Buff->Buffer; + DataSize = Buff->Length; + } + } break; case NdisParameterString:

18 years, 8 months

Keyboard Lights

by James Tabor

Hi all, Has anyone noticed the keyboard lights not working. I guess sometime around first part of December. Thanks, James

18 years, 8 months

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