To not get cease & desist'd to hell, great effort is spent to make sure every bit of code introduced to ReactOS has been properly clean-room engineered. The Windows source code leaks specifically have made a great job to stall ReactOS development. Also the potential legal issues and making an enemy of MS makes it hard to get sponsors. Hence project is entirely developed by unpaid volunteers.
"Windows source code leaks specifically have made a great job to stall ReactOS development."
What you are in effect saying is that Microsoft has essentially killed the ReactOS project off. Are you reasonably sure about this? The reason I ask is that I was under the impression that to overcome any MS code issues that ReactOS was porting Wine code (this ought to be clean).
A supplementary question, as ReactOS is using Wine code what parts still have to be coded that might be in conflict with MS's proprietary code? This question relates to my earlier point about how little info developers are providing potential users. The lack of info doesn't doesn't sound good nor does it offer users much hope.
I've been waiting about 20 of ReactOS's 26 years, unfortunately it seems to me I'll be dead before it's ready.
If I remember correctly, Hartmut Birr, a developer from early times had suspicions (at the time of v2.8/2.9) that a new and very productive developer had disassembled MS code. His code used the MS calling convention to the kernel, before that Reactos used interrupts to access the kernel.
The other developers disagreed and Hartmut Birr quit the project.
Right, I'd read something like that but without the specifics. If that's over-spooked developers then it's a shame. Microsoft has what it wanted—an almost halting of the project.
