Royce Mitchell III wrote:
Hartmut Birr wrote:
Hi,
I don't agree completely with our legal policy. In my opinion, it is allowed to use reverse-engineering to find out interfaces or something like this. It isn't allowed to disassemble windows to study how the fast call entry works or to find out how the APC code is implemented. There exist some paper on the web. It is allowed to use the nice paper from David P. Probert (Windows Kernel Development). It isn't allowed to use the code from the dude called CrazyLord (Reverse Engineer).
This isn't quite fair, unfortunately. We've gone a long time without an explicit policy regarding this subject, mostly because we were all in agreement. You can't boot someone out because they violated a rule that wasn't made clear to them. OTOH, if our position is clearly stated and is violated then I agree - begone with them.
Looking on http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/dev_legalreview.htm http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/dev_legalreview.html, I found: <snip> C. Copyrights of Others The ReactOS Project depends on copyright law for the protection of its code, and by the same token, it respects the copyrights of others. Following are the policies of the ReactOS Project as they relate to copyright: <snip> Disassembly of object code is held to be a form of reverse engineering. Disassembled code listings should be treated with the same terms of license as the object code itself. <snip>
If I understand this correctly with my poor English, it isn't possible to disassembly a part of windows and uses this information to implement the same code in ReactOS.
- Hartmut