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MisterTea an hour ago

I do a lot of industrial automation and it is the one thing that keeps me boat-anchored to Windows. Every little programmable doodad like signal conditioners and temperature transmitters have their own USB programming cables and their own, mostly crappy windows config software. PLC software is another abomination, hopelessly Windows anchored, bloated GUI monsters, some built on top of Visual Studio (Beckhoff TwinCAT.)

I have donated to ReactOS in the past in the hopes of one day freeing myself from this hell.

Almondsetat an hour ago | parent [-]

Why not spend some money on an uncensored LLM to reverse engineer or create an open clean room reimplementation?

wpm 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Because that requires breaking the almost assured stipulation in a software license agreement that says "You will not try to RE this software", which is fine to ignore for home gamers, but not something you generally want to mess around with in a business setting where the risks are much higher.

Almondsetat 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

Reverse engineering is protected under certain conditions, even if the EULA prohibits it

jmcqk6 a minute ago | parent [-]

The thing about this type of thinking is that it often requires risking millions of dollars and a major distraction from your primary goal in order to find out if it's true or not.

kvuj 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The reason industrial PLCs cost so much is because of their reliability. They need to be working flawlessly 50 years in the future. Trying to vibe code your way into a PLC compiler feels like it could blow up in your face after a little while.

That is also ignoring the safety PLCs with safety instructions that are certified for use with ISO 13849. Can you imagine getting inspected because your safety subsystem cause injury and you explain how you don't use the officially licensed software to program it.

For personal project, that could be fun however.

Almondsetat 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

You completely stripped what I said from its context. GP explicitely said they donate to ReactOS in the hopes of one day being able to run that industrial software on it instead of on Windows. In this context, running the software on ReactOS instead of official Windows would already fail your hypothetical inspections. This is why I suggested trying the LLM route.

bluGill an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That is only recently become an option you could try, and we don't know long term how well it will work. Remember laws may change (and there are some legal issues around LLMs that are not clear at all)