My two cents - for what it's worth...

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Blackcats
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Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2006 11:32 am

My two cents - for what it's worth...

Post by Blackcats »

I think you guys made a strategic mistake to remove so much of the code at this point. Of course any code that may have actually been copied from Windows code should have been removed right away, but code that was just "tainted by association" or whatever should have been left in until it was replaced. The new, more stringent IP policy could still be applied for new additions while the old stuff was "grandfathered."

(Or was there fear that if someone had looked at the "tainted" ROS code then their new contributions would then be tainted by association with that? I don't know how many degrees of separation or whatever are required...)

The reason is because one of the most important things for any open source/free software project is to maintain its momentum. If you guys had followed the course of action as described above, some issue may well have arrised a couple years down the road, but by that point the ReactOS project would have grown substanially and it would have a much larger base of developers that could be called on to quickly replace any "tainted" code that still remained. Just like when Linux had the whole deal with SCO come up, they were able to quickly redo all the "tainted" code because they had a huge base of users and developers by that point.

But with everything being set back so much with this, I'm not very optimistic as to the prospects of such a successful rebound. Of course I'd be quite happy if I checked back here in a few months and saw that you guys had proved me wrong!

Best of luck...
ScoTTie
Posts: 165
Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:40 am

Post by ScoTTie »

While it slows down the overall development process, it was the right cause of action. Its also the only true way to be sure all code is in line with the new policy(s) and it wont lead to people having doubts about ReactOS legality or ethics. Not to mention that all the 'tainted' code would still be available in the SVN repository if you checked out older revisions if it was slowly re-written.

For the record there was _no_ Windows source code in ReactOS.
Luemmel
Posts: 58
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2005 7:18 pm

Re: My two cents - for what it's worth...

Post by Luemmel »

Removing this code was not good or bad it was the only acceptable way to handle this situation.
Any other decision would have been the death for ROS on the long run and I personally would have never visited this page again.
Blackcats wrote:... Just like when Linux had the whole deal with SCO come up, they were able to quickly redo all the "tainted" code because they had a huge base of users and developers by that point. ...
There was no "tainted" code in linux and since linux is open source just like ROS it's just not possible to hide anything from a court.
Mrkaras
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Location: Australia
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Post by Mrkaras »

It was unfortunate that so much code had to be removed, momentem is inportant but some developers had left over the code incident already, if they left what chance was there of good new coders comming with the problem still there? Also this shows that reactos is commited to doing the right thing rather than the easy thing and if it recovers from this (i'm sure it will) it can only be for the better in the long run.
mf
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Post by mf »

When we speak of "tainted" code we mean code produced by direct implementation of the disassembly, or "dirty-room reverse engineering". A big part of the kernel was written in this way, and continuing without cleaning it all up would just mean the entire kernel having to be rewritten sometime later on, because you can't keep track of what's clean and what's tainted anymore. The audit was actually already slightly late, considering the fact that developers like Alex Ionescu and w3seek won't have time to work on ReactOS anymore, and their work is pretty much lost, apart from it being a valuable resource to document and reimplement.
It compiles, let's ship it!
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