ReactOS Code Audit 217
reub2000 writes to tell us that in response to talk of "tainted" code within ReactOS Steven Edwards, ReactOS and Wine developer, has called for a complete audit of the entire source tree in addition to procedure and policy changes. From the article: "One final note, this audit of the code is going to take a long time. It could take years, but it will happen, this project will come out better than it was before. I don't believe anything anyone has done while working on this project was really wrong. Every decision has three possibilities, being moral, ethical and or legal. Sometimes the law in itself is unethical and immoral. If people made mistakes and there was a violation of the law, I question the justice of the law and or anyone that would try to prosecute any of the developers who just want the freedom to learn and create a more free system."
ReactOS; we hardly knew you (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame; ReactOS came so far, and got so close (networking was almost ready) and now it's DOA.
It will be missed.
Release it from another country (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ethical vs. Moral? (Score:5, Insightful)
(yes, this is a joke but unfortunatly most people seem to mix up "moral" with "christian/puritanian fucked up double standard bigot moral". The best thing with moral is that you can have your own. There is no Real Moral(tm).)
wine (Score:2, Insightful)
If they all shift to wine coding in the mean time, im sure their will be great benefits.
Re:Ethical vs. Moral? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you tell the truth (because you always tell the truth) and a bunch of innocent people are killed or tortured, then you are probably being ethical but immoral.
Defense Lawyers seem like a pretty good example. They ethically must defend people they may believe are guilty. If they defend poorly on purpose, they are being unethical. I believe (IANAL) that the prosecution must reveal all evidence to the defense but the defense is not required to reveal evidence that would prove guilt if they discover it. I think it would be unethical for them to reveal proof of guilt (and they might be disbarred for doing so) and I also believe it would be immoral for them to do just that.
Since the area of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy they are pretty entwined.
Morals are often tied with sex. If you have 5 partners who all know about each other, you may be viewed as ethical but immoral.
Both morality and ethics are intimately tied to culture. Some acts which are immoral in one culture are moral in others.
Get this to run on Mac OSx86 (Score:2, Insightful)
A field of study vs a measurement by a standard (Score:2, Insightful)
Morality is a specific instance of an ethics. Something is moral if it is acceptable in or follows from the view of ethics in question, and immoral if it is unacceptable or violates that code in some way.
In short, "ethical" says that something pertains to *some* specific philosophical stance. "Moral" is a judgement based on a particular ethical stance.
Re:Use Anti-Plagerism Software Instead of Auditing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:taint (Score:2, Insightful)
Never EVER look at the Windows source code (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's really happening (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm no expert on copyright law (yet) or its restrictions on reverse-engineering. However, I would think making a release in another country won't help. It's the regulation of the ACT of reverse-engineering that you imply causes problems. Where the end product is released is irrelevant.
A robber can't claim immunity from prosecution because he robbed a bank in jurisdiction A and was apprehended while spending the money in jurisdiction B. It doesn't matter if B recognizes robbery as a criminal offense or not. The robbery was committed in A. If robbery is illegal in A, he'll be tried for robbery.
Similarly, unless ReactOS moves all its reverse-engineering activities to more friendly locations, then those individuals doing reverse-engineering in the U.S. are bound by the regulations for that activity. Releasing the finished product somewhere else does not relinquish the legal obligation that U.S. developers have to follow U.S. regulations for reverse-engineering.
Re:Summary is misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
The "clean room' procedure is what enable clone pc's to exist in the first place when compaq cloned the bios with the two engineer method to make their reversing watertight, which it was.
It's nice to try and do that way, but not necessary. I think the big issue for single developers is not so much legally reverse engineering (which is still legal to the chagrin of many ignorant and selfish people) is not so much being right, as having the money to defend themselves in court.
So if you and a buddy "clean room something" that's only half the job. The other half is having money in the bank to cover future possible legal expenses.
I think the lesson we have seen often on slashdot is big corporations "bullying" some little guy who for all intense and purposes is legally right with what they are doing, but the corporation (or their hired suits who need to justify their salary) are the ones who are actually wrong.
Also, I would consider both the DMCA and CTEA immoral laws for a variety of reasons.
Re:TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
The compiler simply is a translator that turns a human-parsable programming language into a machine parsable instruction code. That being said, a translation in the other direction is just as easy.
However, compilers these days are more advanced than the golden old days of computing, and will do crazy things to optimize code (unrolling loops, replacing ineffecient operations with more effecient ones [i = i + 1; -> i++;]). Some of these operatons can't be reliably undone (especially the case with inline functions and macros, because often the code compiler will apply the inline, and then realize there's a way to make it more effecient, thus making the code slightly different than the inline function and causing it to not be reversable), at least without a little human interaction.
And there are open source code decompilers available for a number of languages (for C, as an example, there's DCC [uq.edu.au]. Just don't go decompiling Windows and copying and pasting the code back into ReactOS
Re:taint (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ethical vs. Moral? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a tough argument to win. Can I kill you and take your stuff, so long as I decide it's allowed by "my own" moral system?
It's much easier to defend the idea that morality is absolute, starting with axiomatic principles like human self-ownership. It's all about how we respect the essential rights of our fellow humans. In fact, you can't even defend the idea of subjective morality effectively without this axiom.
Re:Ethical vs. Moral? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it makes you feel better I can say that I think that most other religions have even worse morals.
And of course this wasn't a stab at any individual christian but rather a stab at those who In My Humble Opinion DO have fucked up double standard bigot morals, and they are too many to ignore...
To make you feel even better I also think that atheism often is bigotry. I'm a convinced agnostic.