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ReactOS 0.3.1 Released
fireballrus writes with news of the release of ReactOS 0.3.1 — press release, changelog, download packages. ReactOS is "an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)." The press release notes: "Please don't forget this is an alpha-stage operating system, which means it is not suitable to replace your main OS. Also, this release is aimed to be run mostly in virtualizers / emulators (like QEmu, VMWare, Parallels, etc): because of the big amount of changes, our development team was not able to test/fix all problems which arise when running ReactOS on real hardware."
I've messed with ReactOS on and off for awhile. They really deserve some kudos for what they've accomplished to date, even if the system isn't really usable yet. I strongly encourage you to check them out if you're at all interested in the project; they've done some nice coding to date but can use all the help they can get.
As mentioned, it's perfect to diddle with in a VM environment, though I have loaded it on a dedicated test machine before and that was a lot of fun too.
Because it is not Free? as in Beer and as in Libre?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If there are hidden API's, then that means nobody knows about them, which means, nobody uses them (apart from MS software, but lets be honest, if you're running a free NT clone, you aren't going to be running MS office are you?), which means that it won't affect them in the slightest.
And if there are any hidden API's, the DOJ and EU will hit MS with the antitrust stick.
API changes might be an issue, but again, if the API's are in use, they can't do this without breaking other software. Hiding stuff from a competitor is one thing, but deliberately crippling a rival's software?
That would earn them the antitrust battering ram.
It also wouldn't make much business sense; who would want to develop for a platform where the goalposts are constantly moving?
On the other hand, at that point in time IBM wasn't really all that interested in stopping the development of clone PCs, for a variety of reasons. Had they really chosen to throw their weight around, they most certainly could have, in which case someone else would have taken over (which might have been a good thing for world of personal computing, when you get right down to it.)
Apple, in fact, spent far more time in court suing the likes of Franklin Computer (who, in many ways, had a better product.) Granted, that may have been simply because IBM didn't perceive the personal computer as being a big part of their future, at that point in time, since big iron was still their bread-and-butter. However, if you want to get into the history of anticompetitive behavior at IBM, check out out how they dealt with anyone making plug-compatible components for their mainframe systems in the 60's and 70's. That was a very different story. There's a guy named Amdahl that would be happy to enlighten you.
Besides, the legal climate for reverse-engineering is decidedly less friendly to cloners than it was in, say, 1981.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well it would be interesting to see if the effort allows them to fix some of the flaws and continue to run a lot of the software. For me personally I look at this sort of an effort as a perfect solution to the main thing that keeps me from ditching MS: games.
The only reason why a lot of us would upgrade to Vista is because Microsoft will stop supporting our current OS with bug fixes and security updates. Vista to me looks like a nightmare of DRM and restrictions on what I would want to do, but I can see my current Win 2K install becoming as outdated and unsupported as Windows 98.
If React OS can keep me running my current Windows apps in a sensible, secure, and supported environment, then I can avoid Vista. That means less headaches, and less expense.
Really, these folks may have found a really nice niche.
(Honestly, looking at Vista make me think that this is the time when someone, whether Linux, Mac, or something else, could make significant inroads.)
Three Squirrels
Because most applications that people use are written for Windows.
Once you give people other options for running those apps, that aren't controlled by a company trying to protect their monopoly, you open up a lot of possibilities for the industry to move away from Microsoft lock-in.
By the time the OS will be anywhere near usable and a "drop-in-replacement" for Windows XP, WinXP will no longer be supported by M$ and there will have been the next 5 releases of windows out. Really why not just focus on getting windows programs to run on other OS'es like using wine on linux. A lot of programs already can be run with wine or crossover office and I'm sure Linux has lots of other great programs which can replace many of the programs which people would want to use ReactOS to run anyway. Or focus on the next generation of windows programs using .Net using mono.
The only thing I'd really love to see is a way of using windows drivers under linux. I have a feeling that it is a very difficult thing to do though otherwise I'm sure it would have been done by now.
because
a) there are no patents (yet*) in Europe, so we can still use it.
b) the more small targets MS has, the more difficult it will be for them to cause real damage before we get the law changed to stop their suits and close them down
c) we can learn much abou the Windows API which only real study can teach us. This will be useful in anti-trust lawsuits if nothing else
* http://ffii.org/
So it won't run (or at least won't run well) on actual hardware, so that's the driver issue nullified. I'm not running ReactOS for the drivers, it's running with virtualisation under my already free OS. So I'm running it so i can run Windows programs under my free OS? Why not use WINE? Or push for some standards compliant software that produces results under any operating system? Of course, business situations may require some specific proprietary software, so why not use the specific, proprietary OS?
I try to use only free software, but if I had to use some software under Windows, I'd run Windows. Creating an alpha environment to run proprietary software just seems wrong.
Hide your heads in the sand all you want to...it's your time you're wasting, not mine.
Maybe these people will be able to get jobs as system programmers as a result of this. Maybe they want to see how far they can go before they get sued. Maybe they are hoping that by the time this get to that point the world will be more reverse engineer friendly. Maybe this is just civil disobedience.
In the 70's and 80's UNIX was a product developed by a big company, the phone company to be precise. it has since become an idea replicated many times, always poorly, sometimes less poorly than K&R's implementation. Why can't that happen to windows?
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
The comparison between Apple and IBM is simply not valid. Franklin didn't simply reverse engineer the Apple computer. They copied Apple's design down to the individual electrons. The BIOS and OS was simply stolen from Apple. There was even several places in the Franklin's ROM and in the OS where the string "Copyrighted by Apple Computer" was there for all to see. Even Franklin had to admit they copied the ROM and OS. Franklin tried to use the argument that since the OS and ROM was not in a readable form, it was not copyrightable. They lost on appeal.
Phoenix, on the other hand, carefully documented their reverse engineering efforts. They had a clean room, developers who never saw the IBM BIOS source, and showed how they tested for compatibility. The BIOS IO was well documented and was fairly simple with a very limited number of routines (not to underestimate the challenge of reverse engineering it, but it was simple enough that Phoenix thought it was possible to even undertake the task). The resulting BIOS clone was register compatible, but not source compatible.
The rest of the IBM PC was off the shelf parts, so once the BIOS was cracked, producing IBM PCs clones was a cinch. Later on, IBM attempted to kill the clone market by coming out with the Microbus architecture. The Microbus was copyrightable, so other manufacturers would be unable to produce clones of IBM's newest PCs. However, by that time, IBM no longer dominated the PC market, and other manufactures simply produced their own 32 bit architecture machine. By then, "clones" were no longer clones.
I've written a boot sector and a hello world kernel, so I can begin to appreciate how much work it is to get an OS to the point where you can port Wine to it. I'm shocked at the way you make it sound trivial.
ReactOS already works with many Windows drivers, like nVidia's graphics drivers, and runs about as many apps as Wine, including Firefox. You can't seriously call that "not do[ing] anything real in a VM".
Either you don't know what you're talking about, you're a troll, you jumped to conclusions before getting any info about ReactOS, or all of the above.