http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6155
------- Additional Comments From dank@kegel.com 2007-02-07 13:38 ------- There is a licensing issue (ROS is GPL, but Wine is LGPL) but there's also a tainting issue. The ReactOS community welcomes people who have disassembled large parts of Microsoft Windows to see how it is implemented inside.
For their story, see http://www.reactos.org/en/dev_legalreview.html and http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/TinyKRNL
They say essentially "Oh, no, we stopped breaking the rules last year", but there is reasonable doubt about that. What they did was to move the infringing behavior to the TinyKRNL project, which enthusiastically allows infringment of Windows copyright by disassembly. Many developers work on both ReactOS and TinyKRNL, and the two projects share some code. While the ReactOS/TinyKRNL community thinks this is sufficient separation to avoid legal problems, this is debatable. As a result, the Wine community cannot afford to accept any contributions from the ReactOS community, for fear of IP contamination. Sad, but true.
I imagine wine might be able to accept conformance tests from ReactOS people, but I'm not sure if any have been submitted, and I'm not sure how Alexandre et al feel about even that.
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