And lo On Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:22:31 +0100, SharkD  
<pos### [at] gmailcom> did spake thusly:

> On 6/23/2010 8:56 AM, Kyle wrote:
>> On 6/22/2010 11:18 AM, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
>>> And lo On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:16:53 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull>  
>>> did
>>> spake thusly:
>>>
>>>> Check out the shutdown message. What's with that?
>>>
>>> They Live!
>>>
>>
>> I recall a similar quote from Duke Nukem 3D.
>
> Yep, it's Dike Nukem.

Close, the quote from DN is "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum...  
and I'm all outta gum." The original They Live is a more formal "I have  
come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum"

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a 
> free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with 
> Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this 
> _should_ be 100% illegal.)

  Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.
It's not much different from making an emulator, and those aren't illegal.

  It would be illegal for them to lift binaries (eg. system libraries) from
Windows XP and distributing them alongside their own OS, but it's perfectly
legal for them to build their own versions of those binaries.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a 
>> free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with 
>> Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this 
>> _should_ be 100% illegal.)
> 
>   Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
> would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.
> It's not much different from making an emulator, and those aren't illegal.
> 
>   It would be illegal for them to lift binaries (eg. system libraries) from
> Windows XP and distributing them alongside their own OS, but it's perfectly
> legal for them to build their own versions of those binaries.

I was under the impression that things like (for example) the API for 
DirectX is patented, and therefore you can't write a library that has 
the same API (i.e., the same functions with the same names and 
signatures that do the same thing).

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Invisible wrote:

> You *can* do stuff with it, but it's very unreliable.

Sounds like perfect Windows emulation to me!

Regards,
John

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a 
>> free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with 
>> Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this 
>> _should_ be 100% illegal.)
> 
>   Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
> would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.
> It's not much different from making an emulator, and those aren't illegal.
> 
>   It would be illegal for them to lift binaries (eg. system libraries) from
> Windows XP and distributing them alongside their own OS, but it's perfectly
> legal for them to build their own versions of those binaries.

There may be a term in the EULA which prohibits reverse engineering.  It 
does not strike me as terribly likely that someone managed to write a 
Windows OS clone without doing that.

Regards,
John

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>> You *can* do stuff with it, but it's very unreliable.
> 
> Sounds like perfect Windows emulation to me!

Heheh. What, you mean like this?

http://www.slimeland.com/winsim/

I would say, Win 3.x was quite reliable (then again, it doesn't *do* 
anything), Win 9x was fairly unstable, Win NT was much better, Win XP 
was initially hopeless, and now Win XP has got to the point where it 
usually works just fine. Certinaly it doesn't crash just because you 
open Notepad; ReactOS does. Like, in ReactOS, you can just open an 
Explorer window, click on a few things, and then you notice that the 
mouse has stopped moving and the system is using 100% CPU, and the 
keyboard isn't responding, and...

I haven't seen the Blue Screen of Death from ReactOS yet. Maybe they 
haven't implemented that part?

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John VanSickle wrote:

> There may be a term in the EULA which prohibits reverse engineering.  It 
> does not strike me as terribly likely that someone managed to write a 
> Windows OS clone without doing that.

Depends on what you count as "reverse engineering". If you just mean 
"disassembly", then I'd say you probably can write something functional 
just by reading the API documentation and running tests to see how the 
M$ implementation behaves in various situations. If you count "running 
tests to see how the M$ implementation behaves" as reverse engineering 
then no, not really...

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I was under the impression that things like (for example) the API for 
> DirectX is patented, and therefore you can't write a library that has 
> the same API (i.e., the same functions with the same names and 
> signatures that do the same thing).

  Patents are not international. US patents are not recognized here (and
vice-versa, of course).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> I was under the impression that things like (for example) the API for 
>> DirectX is patented, and therefore you can't write a library that has 
>> the same API (i.e., the same functions with the same names and 
>> signatures that do the same thing).
> 
>   Patents are not international. US patents are not recognized here (and
> vice-versa, of course).

OK. But what's to say that M$ haven't patented the same thing in every 
single duristiction that they operate in?

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Warp wrote:
>   Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
> would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.

It would probably be the "look and feel" lawsuits, even ignoring the patent 
problems.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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