The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement 208
jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we've been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: "In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project's current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project's goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc...). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux's corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death."
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft deliberately made the architecture of Windows so byzantine, baroque, and spaghetti-like that even their own in-house staff of tens of thousands of developers could barely make sense of it
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
ReactOS is a good name (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that Micro$oft will "react" quite badly to this. It's one thing to be Linux where the look and feel is totally different, but if you manage to get a reverse engineered solution for Windows even close to viable, the long knives will come out.
I foresee one of two things happening... 1. The project fails because it is TOO large for the possible gains it could provide and takes too long to get working. 2. The project is successful but M$ kills it by FUD and actual legal action. Both of these are equally possible. If the second option happens, I give them about a snowballs chance of going head to head with M$ and coming out with a commercially viable Windows clone.
Good luck storming the castle boys!
Just ignore it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an oddity, but why do we care about this project anymore? It started out back in '96 to be a clone of Windows 95. Then it was switched to be an NT4 clone. And every few years they update the website to say it's to be a clone of some newer version of Windows.
Meanwhile, it's still pre-alpha, (barely) runs on almost no hardware, and runs almost no programs. Wine is in a far better state. And in recent years, Windows' dominance has even been severely undermined by Android, providing a real, viable alternative OS that happens to be free and open source. And Linux has long since usurped it as the #1 server operating system. So after a couple decades of delays with almost no progress to be seen, ReactOS is on the verge of outliving its usefulness, before it ever started. Sort-of like GNU HURD for Windows fans.
There's plenty of open source OS projects out there that /. doesn't report on twice a year. Let's make ReactOS one of them!
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember one of the earliest Windows dev kit? The one that came on 3.5inch floppys. I seem to remember there were 20 of the leetle buggers. And it came with a tall stack of pretty useless books too.
After I realized there were three duplicate functions for each and every action, and that the parameter list was different for the three different implementations, I returned to Unix and swore that uSoft had NO idea what it was doing.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft deliberately made the architecture of Windows so byzantine, baroque, and spaghetti-like that even their own in-house staff of tens of thousands of developers could barely make sense of it
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
... but don't rule out malice.
Re:Wow, this is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the NT6 kernel is the base for Win Vista/7/8/8.1. Of course that was based on the NT5 kernel from 2000/XP/2003. And that was based on the NT4 kernel from NT4.0. And the NT3.5 kernel is the base for NT4. And the NT3.1 kernel is the base for NT3.51.
And all of this has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Regardless of what was based on what... ReactOS keeps changing their targets, and not getting anywhere.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
I'd suggest that it has also encouraged businesses to think very stupidly about in-house application development, which is where a lot of the problem is.
Essentially, lots of businesses created some in-house apps 10-15 years ago, which make use of quirks, design flaws, and bugs in Windows XP (or earlier) and IE6. Microsoft sat down to fix the quirks, bugs, and design flaws, only to find that they had to choose between dropping support and pissing off a huge portion of their customer base, failing to fix the flaws, or continuing to emulate the bugs for a decade in some kind of "compatibility mode". They've pretty much chosen a middle road that does a little of all three.
The problem is, this has only encouraged a mentality within businesses to think of application development as a one-off project. Management thinks, "Oh, well we'll just pay some programmers to develop a business-critical application, and then we'll be done with it. We'll get rid of the programmers, and the application will just keep working forever, because Microsoft will keep supporting all these whacky design choices." This is a very dangerous way of treating software development. Sooner or later, you're going to have to update your app. If you treated it as a one-off project, then you end up with a decade-long backlog of bugs that were never fixed, and a lack of any expertise because you've gotten rid of all the original programmers.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know that both projects share a lot of code, right? Wine is in a better state because it's solving a smaller problem, and everybody (including ReactOS) is focusing on that smaller problem.
We may need ReactOS in the future for the same reason we need DosBox now. There is a huge amount of code that targets Win7 or lower, and won't be ported to the braindead, sorry, NEWER versions.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting project that deserves some attention. It'd be great if the project got some support and reached a usable state, but it seems like they're learning interesting things-- both about Windows itself, and about the process of trying to reverse-engineer a complex system. Personally, I'm willing to have an occasional /. story that isn't very relevant so long as it's interesting.
Also, the potential value that WINE can't provide is if they can reach a level of running with good driver compatibility, i.e. if you have some old unsupported hardware with a Windows-only driver, there's the potential that you could use that driver and thereby still use the hardware. Sure, it's a very niche use, but I think it was part of the intention of the project.
PDF available? (Score:5, Insightful)
At 480p the text is kind of hard to read ...
Interesting to see their testing methodology and how their massive code base broke a lot of build systems!
Re:Not sure who the target audience would be. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is more of wishful thinking than anything else. Despite the fiasco over Windows 8, Linux is not taking over the market. People are just going for pirated Windows 7 wherever they can get them.
If this project is completed, & reasonably bug free (comparable to Microsoft), then it would be far more successful than Linux. After all, you have a bonanza of both win32 apps from XP, and win64 apps from Windows 7. The project just has to accommodate both of these - currently, it's just targeting the former. Once it's done, PC vendors would preload their PCs w/ it, slap on any commercial software they can bundle w/ it, like say QuickBooks, and then sell it in the market. Or users would download & install it, and be off to the races. After all, just about all the commercial software out there (talking about laptops, not phones or tablets) are Windows.
We have seen the success of Red Hat. Similarly, any company willing to hire developers to maintain a distro of this OS can do wonders. After all, most installations out there today are Windows, and anybody who doesn't want to be dragged kicking or screaming to Windows 8 or Server 2012 could, if this were available, go w/ it. Since it's FOSS, they have the option of hiring Windows devs and maintaining the OS in-house. Or, if there was a Red Hat like company doing this, they could get their OS & service from them. Such a company would not have to push their OS the way Red Hat would have to push Linux.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Insightful)
Malice: the Windows Registry.
Re:ReactOS is a good name (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet you write like a 15 year-old...
Nothing you've said about it hasn't been repeated innumerable times, over a decade ago.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a BIG difference. Essentially an OS is a layer between applications and bare metal, so drivers are needed to run it on every piece of hardware. Linux started to take off when the hardware manofacturers took it seriously and started contributing drivers to it.
ReactOS does not have this problem because all Windows drivers will eventually run natively on it.