[londons_explore]

This is the day that Microsoft releases a product using FreeRDP, the reverse engineered implementation of their own RDP protocol...

[aDfbrtVt]

FreeRDP is not quite reverse engineered, the software built based on open specification for RDP[1]. That being said, I would be surprised if the FreeRDP contributors did not need Wireshark during development.

[1] https://winprotocoldoc.blob.core.windows.net/productionwindo...

[londons_explore]

Didn't FreeRDP start before Microsoft released that documentation?

[aDfbrtVt]

Possibly? Initial commit on FreeRDP is from 2011 while the oldest version listed on Microsoft's website is v0.01 from 2007. Not sure if that version of the documentation was publicly available.

[londons_explore]

FreeRDP's roots are in rdesktop which was released in 2001

[nsonha]

I don't get it why would they need to reverse engineer their own software? Was it some sort of RPC without an explicit protocol?

[londons_explore]

I guess they just decided the freerdp codebase (which already runs on Linux) was easier to work with than their codebase (which is deeply integrated into all things windows).

I think the original Microsoft codebase also uses stuff licensed from a third party, so it might have been impossible to opensource.