Whatever happened to this?

Whatever happened to this?

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Just got an update.

At this rate you can run XP applications in 2050.

It still exists? It just had a somewhat large update like a few days ago

How come M$ never C&D them, if their open goal is to clone WinNT? Is this even remotely accomplishable without infringing on a shitton of patents and whatnot in the process?

the chinese guy making it figured it would be easier to just infect windows systems with his malware than try to make an entire OS for that purpose.

Most likely because they consider it so far behind and incomplete that it's regarded as irrelevant. For similar reasons they don't go after sites like winworldpc for as long as they only host pre-XP stuff (they might have a problem though if some leaked source code appeared there).

They did, which is why ReactOS is so far behind the cure.

M$ sued ROS claiming that they stole Windows source code.

It's perfectly legal to reverse engineer something and then recreate that thing from scratch with none of the original parts. That is what ReactOS devs are doing.

>It's perfectly legal to reverse engineer something
I'm sure many proprietary software EULAs explicitly prohibit exactly that. Also, many patents effectively prevent you from creating any compatible/equivalent alternatives without infringing on the patent.

They had an update last week, claimed to play DOOM 3 and Skyrim now
phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReactOS-0.4.2-Released

EULAs are not above the law, it's legal to take apart something you own. With patents I think the main thing is you cannot make money from the product but ReactOS is free and FOSS.

ReactOS devs are actually a little more careful than most they have two people, one who reverses the original and documents how it works and another person who doesn't ever see the original but uses the documentation to recreate the behavior of the original from scratch. Clean room reverse engineering is legal even in the US.

It's essentially "Wine: The OS." Doing a ground-up recreation of something without having the original source is perfectly legal.

Only parts of the userland are WINE based. The kernel and system level applications are completely in-house recreations.

Just imagining the hundreds and thousands of hours people put into making this OS that will never go anywhere makes me sad. I can only hope most are in it for the learning experience.

>I'm sure many proprietary software EULAs explicitly prohibit exactly that.
Probably, but they don't matter.

So all the popular EULA statements like "you will not reverse-engineeer, disassemble, etc. etc. blah blah blah" are essentially meaningless?

>it's legal to take apart something you own
Proprietary software is almost exclusively "licensed, not sold", meaning that as a user you don't own anything, but are only granted a limited license to use the product within the terms of use/EULA specifed by the copyright holder.

It depends whether those things are actually illegal where you live.

>this OS that will never go anywhere
Yea, the moment it stopped being mostly an academic exercise and actually became relevant in any way, shape of form, you can bet that MS would C&D immediately.

If you paid for the product you can do anything you want with it. You can't necessarily sell or distribute your modifications for profit but you can document how the original product works and post your findings for people to examine. ReactOS isn't selling anything and their OS isn't even based on the original code it's built from scratch.

It doesn't mean shit, you can't stop someone from reimplementing your game engine for different platforms either so long as you don't infringe on patents and copyright, why would it be different for windows?

Nice for an OS that hardly works on anyhting outside virtualbox.

Go try to see their list of working hardware.

I don't hate them but it is a waste of time to watch out for it, as it is to develop it.

ReactOS is actually very useful for my job

Want to find out how an undocumented windows api call works? Go look in the ReactOS source for it

>Having any GNOME graphic whatsoever

Why does this make me sick?