This is false.

There was an issue when there was a leak of windows source code to the internet, and ReactOS effectively had to shut down development for months while all code was audited to make sure no helpful folks had used any of it to 'help' the project.

That's the only MS IP controversy they've been involved in (and I've been watching the project for waaaay too many years now)

(That issue answer reads like someone angry, and with an agenda. It also reads somewhat like the SCO/Linux thing a few years ago - there's no way anyone could write an OS like linux from scratch! It has to be stolen! Also the aforementioned shutdown/cleanup period kinda points to them taking this issue very seriously)

The specific issue is;:

> Many internal data structures and internal functions, not exported anywhere and not part of the public symbols, have the exact same names as they appear in the Research Kernel (which, by the way, is quite obsolete). There is an almost surely zero probability that this happened, at that scale, by accident.

Unfortunately I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have access to the research kernel is capable of answering.

Even if someone had access to compare it, I wouldn't put the probability at 0. Windows has a pretty specific way of naming types, fields and functions. Some of those leak through error messages and other methods of introspection. They're have to match on a few very esoteric private fields to support that argument.

He didn't know that Microsoft had shipped private symbols publicly by accident several times.

The guy seems to point to the reasons for his opinion, that's why I'm asking. I'm not so invested to check symbol names in the reactos repo vs the leaked code.

It was by one "I am very smart. Nobody can be as smart as me" Microsoft programmer. Who completely dismissed this explanation https://youtu.be/2D9ExVc0G10

ReactOS denies those accusations. If it's true and proved, probably users should stop using it, but until it's proved, I don't think that it's an issue. Like you've got some software, you checked its license, it's open source reimplementation of Windows, sounds good. For example Valve uses wine to run games on Linux, it's pretty legit.

WINE and ReactOS are separate projects and the allegations in the Quora post are specific to ReactOS. WINE doesn't handle NT kernel internals; it reimplements public Windows APIs and proxies kernel functionality to the host userland (usually GNU+Linux+X11 but occasionally Darwin+AppKit).

The main existential threat to WINE would be the Oracle/Google case being decided (sometime before June). If that winds up creating adverse precedent to Google's case, the entire Free Software movement will be negatively impacted. Actually, it'll be like 100 SCOs, given how much of our Free foundations are functionally-compatible reimplementations. We'll lose pretty much everything except scripting language runtimes, Rust, and C compilers; and there would surely be no way to do something like WINE if SCOTUS decides to trample all over the merger doctrine and starts granting copyright on functionality.

Let's do the reverse: call out BSD folks and sue everyone for using the C API + BSD networking.

BSD networking was distributed under a very permissive license, so that would extend to any new APIs included in BSD. You'd have to argue that the BSD license doesn't cover API rights, which would basically be like trying to argue that it's not really permissively licensed at all.

You'd probably have a better argument for GPL violation for non-GPL reimplementations, but I'm not aware of that many people doing proprietary reimplementations of Linux APIs. Hell, even Microsoft stopped trying that when they moved to WSL2.

Sounds like FUD - There are things like NT4.5 which is NT built from university source copy of (as the name suggests) NT as it was somewhere between 4.x and 5.0.

But ReactOS is clean room, and like Wine, AFAIK actively bars from contributing people who had contact with MS source code - IIRC it also cooperates heavily with Wine on implementing things.