[ros-dev] To end all rumours...

[Alex Ionescu]

Aleksey and I thought it would be a good idea to end rumours and write
up an official stance on the topic, so here is a paste from the website,
for those of you that don't read it:

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The official letter written by project coordinators of these projects

by fireball on 2006-05-18
ReactOS and TinyKRNL projects' official relationship

Prepared by Aleksey Bragin and Alex Ionescu, Project Coordinators.

There is a little information posted officially about TinyKRNL project
and this provides a base for gossip to appear. This short article is
intended to clear up official relations between these two projects.

TinyKRNL is an educational and documentation project which creates
plug-in replacements for various modules of Windows 2003 SP 1
(ultimately replacing the kernel too) and a series of papers ultimately
combined into a book. The methods used for development of TinyKRNL’s
modules source code involve all possible methods of achieving the end
result of having a 100% compatible (or even identical) result. Reverse
engineering is one of them (mainly so-called ‘dirty’ way, for further
reference see Wikipedia’s article about clean room reverse engineering
vs. dirty room reversing).

Unfortunately, due to copyright laws and other law-related stuff,
ReactOS (which aims at commercial usage too) can not directly utilize
methods of development like dirty reverse engineering, and thus ReactOS
can not share all code with the TinyKRNL project like we are sharing
code with WINE.

However, there are some very useful exceptions:

    * Firstly, all interfaces are shared. This gives ReactOS project an
unbeatable level of compatibility and legal freedom too (interfaces can
not be copyrighted).
    * Secondly, the great thing is that TinyKRNL will provide the most
complete documentation of the most recent and technically advanced
version of a released NT-famility operating system – Windows 2003 SP1.
ReactOS developers can use this documentation for reference when
creating a clean implementation of functions or improving already
developed code.
    * Thirdly, any code in TinyKRNL which respects the ReactOS policies
regarding development can directly be added into ReactOS, as well as any
build tools or 3rd-party files.

For more detailed information regarding TinyKRNL project, please look at
http://www.tinykrnl.org. We also encourage you to signup on the TinyKRNL
. We also encourage you to signup on the TinyKRNL development Mailing
List by sending a blank email to devel-subscribe(a)tinykrnl.org as well as
joining the #tinykrnl channel on the same IRC server as #reactos; many
of the ReactOS developers and users are usually present and discuss
interesting and challenging kernel issues as well as general off-topic chat.
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