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.

 

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
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