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
Good to hear that the project will live on. And I do hope that it is free of all microsoft code in the end.
Would it be possible to give certain non-developers like me read-only access to the subversion repository?
Also, what is the point of closing the forum?
Steven Edwards wrote:
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
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
I know that this is an aweful time to state this but I think that ReactOS should revert back to a stable copy of a revision that no known Microsoft code exists. Also it is time to state that ReactOS should utilize better Wine and Samba code integration to better complete the Operating System. Wine should be updated, as well Samba 4 tech preview should be utilized because of its NT VFS which could provide ReactOS with a better NTFS filesytem implementation or VFS over FAT.
Doing this would allow ReactOS to integrate better with newer technology projects.
I know that this is an aweful time to state this but I think that ReactOS should revert back to a stable copy of a revision that no known Microsoft code exists.
This is exactly the plan.
Also it is time to state that ReactOS should utilize better Wine and Samba code integration to better complete the Operating System.
We already use as much Wine code as possible. We were planning on using Samba code too, but it will take time to get back to the point where this is possible.
GvG
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Ge van Geldorp -
Reuben Perelman -
Rick Langschultz -
Steven Edwards