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There are some real applications that could come out of this rather than just endless virtualization - much of it could prove useful to ReactOS which aims to be a open source alternative OS to Windows...
Also another in the pipeline which need a lot more work on Wine before anything will happen with it (XOpenWin, which aims to replace the Windows GDI with XWindows :-))
Wine and other related things need developers, so sign up and get coding. Check out the wine-devel mailing lists for more useful info...

ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers.

>[Qt is fully GPL] Only when compiling for the X11 target

Not if you purchase a license! Qt is well worth the money!

Only if you're in a for-profit business. Qt/Mac will expire after 30 days. Most hobbyist developers (such as myself) don't have upwards of $1500 for a widget set. And according to this FAQ entry, Trolltech releases Qt Free Edition only for operating systems that are free software. Thus, Trolltech will not release Qt for Windows until ReactOS is complete, nor Qt for Mac as free software until GNUstep is complete.

Time for YARP (Yet Another ReactOS Plug)!

The operating system is TOTALLY irrelevent when it comes to most users. There are only three things that matter: 1) Applications,

Check.

2) Hardware support, and

Check. Sort of :-)

3) Applications.

Check ;-) So, do you think that ReactOS can make it?

My observation has been, that no one truly understands the internals of a windows system. [...]

Not meaning to spam, but it sounds like you may be interested in - and most people here could use a look at - ReactOS (it's Wine's complementary project - Wine provides the user-mode part, and we the kernel). Windows is no more a Microsoft thing only

With windows the admin's education is limited to what M$ wants them to know. Thus severly handicapping their diagnostic abilities and their intuition.

Exactly, that's the whole point. Nobody of the poeple I know in person really knows Windows, and that includes our CS lab admins. Windows admins generally don't have any knowledge of the system, so they assume that there's nothing more to Windows than what they see, they can't tell the different Windows components apart (how many times did you use the term "Win32" to mean the whole system? well, it's wrong, Win32 is just a part, and not that unreplaceable either), basically they're slaves of the machine

Learning to code (and I remind you that Windows has one of the best Perl distributions around, and that Python does OLE) is a step in the right direction, but not enough. The Microsoft documentation for low level stuff is full of half truths, silences and plain lies

If you really want to get your hands dirty and actually learn something about Windows, have a look at ReactOS (shameless self-plug ;-): it's Windows, it's open source

There is an open source build of the NT Kernel,it doesnt work very well now but it has a good future. it is called ReactOS You Can get it here

Umm, no. NT is DOS based with a GUI on top. Most services still load in DOS. The only thing about NT is that command interpter forces the GUI to autmagically load.

Check out ReactOS if you don't believe me.

The work is going on for porting OS/2 to ReactOS (Freeware NT clone). For me this seems to be the most promising project. There're already a lot of developers for OS/2 subsystem as well as horde of them for the OS itself. Site is under construction but mailing list is >20 messages a day.

For all who wonder - there's still life in OS/2 though not too much of it. OS/2 links:

• OS/2 News and Rumours
• ecomstation site working link
• Hobbes forever

Yeah, not like there are any other examples of open source software based on proprietry software.

tlhf

xxx

Also, your linked article talks about a compiler which compiles itself. IE, GCC recognising GCC. Having GCC regocnise BCC, VC++, et al would be insanly difficult. Even more so in this case as Mono is being released after the Microsoft compiler.

> What's next? FreeWindows?

Already started :)

A WinNT clone: www.reactos.com

U forgot freedows (formerly @ freedows.com). Try again.
U could try reactOS 2.
HAND

Thanks to a minute group of volunteers, there will soon be a spread of windows nt clones. One example is Reactos. This kernel, united with wine dll's emulation could be a viable alternative to microsoft-branded NT operating systems. Not to mention the already established use of Linux on the server side...

Check out ReactOS.

They are working on a GPL Windows emulator. It can already run some console-mode apps.

It is still in very early development, so I wouldn't suggest you go out and run it (except for purposes of testing and debugging), but if you are looking for a worthy project to contribute to, consider this one.

From Timothy's question concerning GPL infringement, it might be construed that he has already assumed that there _is_ GPL infringement... and he's quite possibly right. Unfortunately becasue SkyOS is closed source, we will never know. Wine OTOH is an implementation of the win32 API written without access to microsoft's windows code... and therefore can't be an infringement of the windows copyright. In theory they _might_ be guilty of
reverse engineering microsoft code but that's alot harder to do and probably not the case. Linux has been successful because it has been open sourced. Microsoft has been successful... well not's get into that, but what I was going to say included the word "illegal". SkyOS will most probably go nowhere. ReactOS OTOH has a very good chance of being successful (althought in a much smaller arean than Linux). In the original posters article, the ReactOS link[osnews.com] links to an article in osnews.com where the authour of ReactOS talks about similarities and differences with PetrOS and also about GUI stuff... but presumably, the best GUI for ReactOS would be implemented through wine... Isn't that the only API / GUI (in the windows world API and GUI are confused) that makes sense?

From Timothy's question concerning GPL infringement, it might be construed that he has already assumed that there _is_ GPL infringement... and he's quite possibly right. Unfortunately becasue SkyOS is closed source, we will never know. Wine OTOH is an implementation of the win32 API written without access to microsoft's windows code... and therefore can't be an infringement of the windows copyright. In theory they _might_ be guilty of
reverse engineering microsoft code but that's alot harder to do and probably not the case. Linux has been successful because it has been open sourced. Microsoft has been successful... well not's get into that, but what I was going to say included the word "illegal". SkyOS will most probably go nowhere. ReactOS OTOH has a very good chance of being successful (althought in a much smaller arean than Linux). In the original posters article, the ReactOS link[osnews.com] links to an article in osnews.com where the authour of ReactOS talks about similarities and differences with PetrOS and also about GUI stuff... but presumably, the best GUI for ReactOS would be implemented through wine... Isn't that the only API / GUI (in the windows world API and GUI are confused) that makes sense?

If you don't want that happening, please support the GCC/MingW/CygWin, ReactOS and WinE open source projects.

We've already been over this:

Freedows: www.freedows.org
Alliance OS: www.allos.org
(Alliance OS broke off from Freedows because of lack of progress and dissatisfaction with the "management"; see the Slashdot article above).
ReactOS (an NT clone): www.reactos.com

There is an NT cloning project called ReactOS already going on. These guys ought to join up with that effort.

> and then they set off to create NT, an OS that nobody even wants to clone

Methinks you forgot to check facts before posting ;-)

http://www.reactos.com/

Heheh...I remember back in 96 or so, they advertised it as Freedows98 (Not just a snack anymore), because they thought that they'd have complete emulation by 1998. But not just of Windows. No, no with the Stanford Cache Kernel, they'd be able to emulate every operating system known to man, in just a few years.

What do they have to show for it? Well http://www.freedows.org/ is a pretty spiffy web site. Translated to a whole buncha languages. But there's no code. There's not even any specifications. And of course, years ago a group broke of from them to form ReactOS, which is supposed to be compatible with NT. Right now, all they have is a small kernel and the beginnings of a command shell. There's also Alliance OS, which like Freedows, is based on the Caching Kernel idea. It also has a nice web site, but very little code.

Seems like that's how most ambitious projects end up. Moral of the story? No matter what they say, most 14 year olds can't code worth a damn, let alone write an operating system. The Freedows team wasted their time doing stupid stuff like writing a C library from scratch. And still, after so many years, they have nothing. That's what I call pathetic.

Not only Win32 on top of the ReactOS kernel: POSIX+ too.

I finally found the link again. It is www.reactos.com. There are more than likely others, but this one is under the GPL. I think www.winehq.com has a whole list of such projects under the "other" link.

I realize this is off topic, but there are a lot of people crying for MS to release the Windows source code and that is not likely so I give you this. There is a little website at www.reactos.com that is working under the GPL to make a free windows system (kernel, api, dll's, drivers, etc). I have never tried it, but the idea is cool and I am sure that they need developers if you consider the magnitude of such a project.

Copyrights and software patents are the real evil here. Personnally, I'd like to see the action against MS be invalidating all of their patents -- especially with the threat they have to the Open Source movement (as revealed in the Halloween documents). Of course, I'm biased given that MS software patents could be a problem for ReactOS =) Don't get me wrong -- I'd like to see ALL software patents abolished. But this could be a very good first step.

There seems to be a lot of projects around lately going about implementing Win32 API, and the NT kernel, or for that matter DOS(Win98/95). I personally, don't think it is trully possible to write a full featured Win32 OS, Microsoft can simply change the API on the next release, and then you have to change yours. It is a constant game of catch-up.

However, I've been looking into ReactOS, another project to clone Windows NT. It seems to be going along pretty well, they even have a kernel. The advantage of ReactOS is that it is Open Source/Free Software.

Since people are going to work on the Win32 API for ReactOS, and there is already a project to implement the Win32 API for X that has been going fairly well, I think that PetrOS and ReactOS, will probably end up sharing some code. (If Trumpet is smart...), and soon we will see a viable alternative to Windows, but it will be one always playing catch up.

If you are looking for a good start on an NT Clone which is open source, look at ReactOS:

www.reactos.com

It sounds like they are about as far along as the folks at Trumpet doing with PetrOS, and is 100% open source and GPL. ReactOS is also borrowing quite a bit from WINE, but trying to make a full operating system rather than just a LINUX shell.

There are more than 1000 functions in the native API (ntoskrnl.exe + hal.dll are the modified microkernel). A minimum part is available to user mode via ntdll.dll. Unfortunately less than 10 per cent are documented by MS.

There is also a GPL'ed implementation of that microkernel: its name is ReactOS. It is planned a Win32 server on top of it and probably a POSIX+ one in the future. This project borrows some code from Wine. You can download the pre-alpha code (no GUI yet!) from www.reactos.com.

My dad has a (multiheaded, cool as hell) Solaris workstation at his office.... So, Unix IS used as a workstation, but since most Idiots find the "start" button compelling, my dad, and many others are forced to have an NT crapstation running office right next to it...


By the way... Talking about NT, has anyone taken a look at reactos? it is supposed to be a clone of NT... Its also, not the first Opensourced OS attempting to run windows software. But this one seems to be progressing... (whereas previous attempts, have come to a standstill for, seemingly, a year now)