Use it in it's entirety. This would speed up the entire audit project. Also, it would make a lot of problems go away. Maybe we can have a 0.30 ROS distribution. I don't care if a tag line of: WRK copyright (R) 2006 Microsoft Corp.
I do not care. I want to see a PowerPC ReactOS version. I am working on a design for a Mini-ITX form factor PowerPC G4 1Ghz motherboard to run ROS.
On 3/20/06, Alex Ionescu ionucu@videotron.ca wrote:
Hi,
Later this spring, Dave Probert's project will finally be complete with the realease of the WRK to academia, which means that almost any student such as I, Brandon, Filip, etc will have access to it. What is the WRK?
The WRK (Windows Research Kernel) is Microsoft's answer to Linux/BSD source code used in classes. It is a special version of the NT Kernel designed to be used with the CRK (Windows NT Curriculum Kit) based on Windows Internals 4th Edition. It is a collection of about half a million lines of kernel code, including almost all of the process manager, object manager, thread scheduler, and other components discussed in the book. The PnP Manager, Power Subsystem, Kernel Debugger however are missing, as well as other specific code. This code is located in static libraries which are linked in at the end to create a complete kernel.
What of the license? It is the reason why the WRK is so exciting and it's taken so long to come out (thank the lawyers). The license allows viewing, modifying and *creating derived work*, as long as any changes are also sent back to MS and that copyright is not misattributed. Additionnally, the license explicitly permits the creation of books or other reference material, including the presense of code snippets to better explain something, as well as sharing information in community forums. All this is allowed for any non-commercial or educational use, including personal research. The WRK also ships with Virtual PC, the build environment (similar to how we use QEMU/Dazzle for TinyKRNL) and full documentation for all the Native APIs.
With such a wonderful thing at our disposal, how will this impact the kernel audit (postively)? What decisions do we take regarding the WRK? Do we use it? We can either use it entirely (ReactOS is, IIRC, an non-commercial research project, unless you still want to "vanquish the evil MS and sell millions"), but that would mean attributing copyright to Microsoft which many here would puke at. Alternatively, it can be used as pure documentation, which gives us all the freedom in the world.
Or, we can be our true anti-MS/MS-bashing arrogants and call the WRK a heresy that should never be approached or used.
Best regards, Alex Ionescu _______________________________________________ Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
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