Steven Edwards On The Future Of ReactOS And Wine

Alex_Ionescu writes "WineHQ brings us the scoop on the latest developments in ReactOS, as well as on Steven Edward's excellent job on porting Wine to MingGW and linking the two platforms together. This is an interesting insight into the WINE and ReactOS project, and a must-read for anyone interested into the future of Windows-replacement projects like these."

Comments

Why clone Unix?

[jschottm]

Unix was cloned for a number of reasons. First, it's (or very similar clones) been used extensively in the teaching of college level OS courses (Lyons, Tanenbaum, et al), so when students decided to write their own, it was natural to model their OSes after what they'd learned. As has been beaten to death in the past few weeks, Minix was specifically designed to be small and compact so that students could understand it in a semester. How many versions of Windows is that true for? *BSD obviously came out of the education system, and Linux was written in response to Minix.

Second, Unix systems have been established a track record of power and reliability (yes, there have been very bad Unixes, and they tend to have been removed from the marketplace). Windows ... hasn't. It's gotten remarkably better, and a good deal of its problems are due to 3rd party drivers, but my well maintained W2K desktop and XP laptop still need to be rebooted every two or three weeks. And there's the never ending string of serious vulnerabilities. At an OS level, Windows has a lot of nice ideas. The problem is, most discussions about them seem to run, "They had a nice idea, but..."

Windows is changing rapidly, in ways that are likely to make programs incompatable with older versions (the better to force upgrades with, I'm sure). I'm sorry, but if after 7 years of work the project is almost within grasp of being able to use a DHCP client, I don't see any way they can keep up with Microsoft. If they want to work on it as a hobby and have fun doing so, more power to them. I just don't see it as being something overly useful. Screenshots of minesweeper (with poor graphics) aren't what I want to see. I want to see a version of Group Policies, Active Directory capability, and so on.

*BSD and Linux suceeded, not simply because of price, but because they were *better* in various ways than the competition. Microsoft has a tremendous software and driver collection, and has begun to do some really cool stuff. OS X has a simple UI that many people adore. What does ReactOS bring to the table, if it's three generations behind Microsoft? DR-DOS was cheaper and better (IMO) than MS-DOS, but Microsoft still ground it underneath their boots.

Re:Why clone Unix?

[jschottm]

1. True. I find it more academically interesting that other groups are using/considering using the kernel with a different user environment than the concept of cloning Win NT. But I can't help but wonder if the effort would be better spent working on Wine or allowing Linux or FreeBSD to use Windows drivers. But as you said, why not? It's their time and their choice.

2. Open source may not need money to survive, but it does require "the itch" that causes the programmers to scratch. Remember, writing the software is the easy part. Testing the code and making it bulletproof is the hard part. I've seen many open source projects get 90% done and fall apart because they find that there just isn't that much consumer interest in it, and there wasn't the motivation to get over the hump of sitting there are 2 in the morning trying to track down that memory leak that seems to only happen every 27th time a function is called.

As far as DR-DOS, what makes you think that if ReactOS were to actually threaten MS, what makes you think they wouldn't squash them through use of FUD, patents, or other such measures? Given that MS Office is still 'the killer app' for offices, I doubt it would take much code to make it develop mysterious errors when running under ReactOS.

Other than the fun-for-the-programmers aspect, I'm still just not seeing the target market for this. With home users, either they need the absolute basic stuff (word processor, e-mail, spreadsheet, browser). I suspect that by the time that ReactOS is finished and stable, there'll be cheap Walmart or AOL branded Linux boxes that fill that role nicely. Home users looking to play games won't be interested, because modern games will be so far above what NT can handle. (I suspect that MS has more people working on DirectX alone than the entire ReactOS team.) And most business users will shy away from anything that's not heavily tested. My employer provides me with a copy of VMWare and WinXP, because it's far cheaper to purchase those than to have me burn hours futzing around with a first generation cloned OS.

So we're back to "why not," which I think is a better answer than, "why clone Unix?"

Re:Why clone Unix?

[JohnFred]

This is just NOT true. It's revisionist history. However, the nice thing about the web, is that the original article written by the first person outside MS to discover the code is still online.

This is what's known by historians as a primary source.

Good progress

[WhoDaresWins]

I've been surprised how far ReactOS has come along. I didn't expect them to progress this much by now. I could actually install the last release on real hardware and it installed and ran AbiWord just fine! BTW a lot of people seem to have problems with the install CD .iso based installation of ReactOS. There is a simpler way to run it if you have a FAT16 or FAT32 C:\ boot partition, just download the binaries and unzip them to C:\ReactOS\. Then just boot from a DOS floppy and run aboot.bat within C:\ReactOS. Works like a charm everytime (for the past half dozen releases anyway). BTW if you insatall the VESA mode VBE driver (search the kernel mailing list) then you can get AbiWord working in true color. Its impressive to see it working considering how far ReactOS has yet to go.

A perfect name

[foreverdisillusioned]

porting Wine to MingGW

Hey, why not call it that? "Port"! I dunno if renaming a port is unusual, but if so I think we can make an exception in this case.

I see where ReactOS could be REALLY useful

[nickol]

It's embedded systems. Today, Microsoft has Embedded NT 4.0 which is too expensive, WinXP that is too heavy for most embedded computers, and WinCE embedded which is a kind of a joke.

What we really need for those PC104 and other small boards is an OS with the following features:

open-source and configurable

reliable and stable

small resources requirements

working from ROM

Win32 compatible, supporting DCOM and MS-style networking.

There is no need for DirectX, scanner support and such. It looks much like that despite Microsoft declares embedded systems support as one of their primary goals, they just do not know what to do.
WinCE is for PDAs, not for industrial systems.

Re:Why?

[KJKHyperion]

You look at Windows and you think "past" and "legacy". We (ReactOS) look at Windows and think "future" and "innovation"

This you say is (my personal opinion, not the project's official position), a lot like people deluding themselves in thinking that a Linux kernel for the next Windows would mean instant improvement. If you knew a bit more about Windows you'd knew it doesn't even make sense - the Windows kernel has proved to be a sound design and I'd be happy if we could at least duplicate it. It's the system services that need a serious redesign, dragging the legacy microkernel corpse as they are, and I'm already doing some research in that direction (currently reimplementing the console model to be driver-based instead of server-based, and allowing custom UI implementations. This will give you, the user, custom terminal emulators, a more efficient SSH server and a job-controlling shell - even a port of your beloved GNU screen. Next stop: overhauling the service manager and rationalizing the user-mode startup sequence)

And please realize that a supposed intrinsic and purely technical superiority of Linux exists almost entirely in your mind - old kernels (2.4 and earlier) weren't that hot, and when you say "Linux" you generally mean "GNU" (those who say "Linux" meaning "Beowulf" or "OpenMOSIX" are the minority) - and realize that "commodity" also means "largely irrelevant" and "expendable" - when ReactOS gets good enough, it could replace even Linux for some people