OSDev.org

It was posted on www.slashdot.org and http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/pres ... source.asp that the Windows NT 4.0 and 2k source was floating around on the 'net. Not to...imply...any illegal activities by our fine up-standing OS dev community but has anyone taken a look or know what the deal is (e.g. is it full source)?

I think I'm speaking for many if I say, "I'm not interested".

For one, the claim that "the source is the documentation" doesn't hold. Just by having access to a couple of hundreds of megabyte source code doesn't tell you much, unless you're in a mind of reverse-engineering the corresponding documentation.

Then, copying anything from any OS, legal or not, usually has severe implications on the rest of the system. You cannot just copy the Linux scheduler and the Windows GUI into your OS - an OS is more than the sum of its parts, and unless your design makes ends meet, you'll end up with an ugly chimera full of problems.

Bottom line, I'd rather make further inroads in reading Tanenbaum and other relevant literature than hunting down and sifting through Windows source...

That being said, German computer news source heise.de reports that ~30.000 files are said to have leaked - which "wouldn't really suffice to build your own Windows, since the Linux kernel alone - no GUI, no browser, no ... - sums up ~12.000 files".

good points.

'd rather do some complicated baking than trying to read even a fart of windows source code.

Having a good read (Tanenbaum & sorts) is way more elucidating.

The sentence about OS being more than the sum of its parts - it reminds me of something: Its a kind of magic ... yo, and it likes to evolve, the OS *gg*

For God's sake I don't want to use any of it's features or copy the code (I don't think I could handle a lawsuit as well as Linux has against SCO). I just want to see the code. Sorta like going to an art gallery, look but don't touch (and maybe laugh at what some people consider "art")

I agree with wangpeng, it would be nice to see how "they" code, I wonder if we can see any of it by chance. ;D

Like "little shop of horrors"? Hehe... ;D

wangpeng wrote: For God's sake I don't want to use any of it's features or copy the code (I don't think I could handle a lawsuit as well as Linux has against SCO). I just want to see the code. Sorta like going to an art gallery, look but don't touch (and maybe laugh at what some people consider "art")

The problem is, if you just "look" at the code, and then later you write something similar, you face the possibility of lawsuits, because you might have learned what you just implemented from watching the source, and you don't want to go to courtroom to try to tell that you didn't.

I guess. Similar isn't the right word though. Minix was Unix except that it didn't use any of Unix's code. They were identical when it came to concept machinery. And, as we know, Minix is still around (in source form, I doubt there are many Minix machines hanging around).

Well, algorithms are not protected by copyright laws, although you cannot copy code, you can always trace code and try to see how it works and code the similar algorithm with different codewords and micro$oft can do nothing about it. Well but I wouldnt tell bill gates about it if i do something with it.

Ozgunh82 wrote: Well, algorithms are not protected by copyright laws...

...except in the US, where this is perfectly possible. (I remember a patent on using colored bars to designate appointments in a calendar application...)

btw if you read at the CLUF (or i dunno what MS license for end-user is named in english), you'll see that reverse-engineering (looking at the binary and try to figuring out how it works) is prohibited, except if your local laws allows you to do so.

Here in Belgium, we can do so only in order to provide software that will interoperate with the reverse-engineered software -- certainly not in order to *replace* it

Pype.Clicker wrote: CLUF (or i dunno what MS license for end-user is named in english...

EULA - End User's License Agreement.

Pype.Clicker wrote: Here in Belgium, we can do so only in order to provide software that will interoperate with the reverse-engineered software -- certainly not in order to *replace* it

But what if you want to interoperate with every file on the computer? Doesn't that count?

BTW, so that says you can disassemble windows to make your own NTFS driver, doesn't it? I mean, if you want to interoperate, you have to be able to read, so you must know how it's built up. right?

actually, it would rather 'allow' you to reverse-engineer windows to write another NTFS driver for something that the original NTFS driver couldn't do ... and do it *for windows*.

However, as the MS guys splitted the responsibilities of HAL - low level FS - higher layer FS - apps quite fine, you're unlikely to find something that will be defendable in a court. And most of the times, the documentation MS provides (or sells) is from far sufficient. Just look at Symantec tools ... they're doing probably the hardest things you could think of with an NTFS partition -- and i doubt they reverse-engineered whatever bit of NT ...