They did a clean room reverse engineering of Windows and it's still legal, it works, and it can run quite a good lot of Windoze applications! I wouldn't be surprised if it could run Freelancer. And that's Microsoft's god-damned operating system they copied for Pete's sake! If we did that same thing with FLServer we'd have the ultimate, stable, bugfree, free implementation of the software and not have to pay Microsoft! (that I know of.)
I know about ReactOS and its predecessor. I also know of the time used in developing ReactOS.
If we only look at ReactOS from the time they began targetting NT based versions of Windows, and not from the inception of the project (FreeWin95) their kernel rewrite started in Q1 2007, and hasn't finished yet. They haven't even denominated a version as a beta test, all their available code revisions so far are in an alpha state.
The only reason ReactOS have a userland part (The GUI and means to interact with the kernel) is because of the Wine project, itself running for more than 16 years now. And none of those projects has in that long run managed to cleanroom reverse engineer their intended target parts of the Microsoft Windows OS to a dot.
FLserver is ofcourse not as complicated to code, as a complete OS, but still, a complete cleanroom reverse engineering of FLserver will take lots of man-power and man-years.
IF such a project got started, a result would not be ready for the first couple of years or even more. Remember, FL took several man-years to develop. A cleanroom reverse engineering will also take several man-years to make.
I just don't see neither the Discovery Mod community, nor the complete Freelancer community have the required critical mass to have talented codeanalysts and programmers enough to do such a sissyfosean task within this decade, nor the next.
IMHO a reverse engineered fixed FLserver is a nice dream to have - But thats all it is : A dream.
But again as I said in my previous post - Feel free to prove me wrong with code - But for the love of Sirius, stop using the "we just need to rewrite FLserver" (while looking in Cannon's direction ??!?) as a solution to any and all limitations the current flserver has.
Cpt. Miller, of the BHG|Core vessel "Miller's Draft"
Out of bats, Out of bots, Out of torps - Down to harsh language...
