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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."
The legal issues associated with reverse engineering an operating system to run programs originally written for windows should not be any scarier than those associated with reverse engineering (clone) the hardware to run software written for IBM PC. IBM had deep pockets and a penchant for enforcing its large IP portfolio, but the cloners won.
my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.
What I'd really like to see is some major company getting behind reactos and wine. Getting a portable win32 layer really working to the point where it's no longer just a toy is going to take a major effort, more of an effort than the open source community seems willing to put forward at this time. Working win32 is a real possibility, but it needs a lot of people to get behind it.