• TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s a miracle we have wine at all, reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy. Be grateful for what we have (which is already enough to run a ton of software really well)

      • AnonTwo@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Hasn’t ReactOS been accused of using code that was not reverse-engineered multiple times? If they became too big MS would probably just sue them.

        • Elsie@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          From what I’ve heard they used some assembly code directly for very low level functions.

      • mistrgamin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Unrelated but everytime you end a sentence with an ellipsis I imagine someone’s nerdy youtube rantsona with their arms crossed and a sly grin

    • TCB13@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy

      Have you noticed the the NT / Windows XP source code was leaked years ago. There’s isn’t much of a need to “reverse engineering”, it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…

        • TCB13@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Guess that rule was in place because some people would look at it and proceed to copy it. The rule should be “if you copy code from Microsoft you’ll be kicked from the project and the code removed”. While I see why this is place and what it protect the project from this is also a very big roadblock to the project’s evolution and a clear example of what’s wrong with it and why we still have compatibility issues.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…

        That sounds difficult though. Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?

        • TCB13@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?

          What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.

          • Otter@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            What are you talking about?

            Ah the term I was looking for was “clean room”

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

            See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup