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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.
The legal issues are kinda scary but it looks like they have them under control. All respect to them for attempting the impossible... and from the look of it, they're a good way to succeeding :)
does it run cygwin?
here: http://www.reactos.org/en/screenshots.html
Because it is not Free? as in Beer and as in Libre?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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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?
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.
Keep in mind that they share a lot of their user-level code with WINE, and the WINE and ROS teams do help each other, this is in their FAQ.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
What if, as it becomes closer to a release product, it becomes decentralized. Anyone who had done enough work on the original ReactOS walks away from the project perhaps with a public request not to use their work. What if there is no one person or entity to sue? Patches could be written for specific issues by the user community, so support would be distributed as well. Basically, is there a way to spread the legal vulnerability/liability between so many people, that MicroSoft would have to resort to suing thousands of individuals for very small amounts, with a limited chance of success in each case?
We are all just people.
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.
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.
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.
WINE
IS
NOT an
Emulator
WINE is an API wrapper layer, not a processor achitecture substitute, hence the code needs to be written for the same chipset as the machine (means x86 in most cases) and there isn't a virtual performance penalty (no pun intended).
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
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.