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ReactOS Revealed
reactosfanboy writes "DRM Hacker Alex Ionescu explained the internals of ReactOS in a recent talk. Ionescu indicates that ReactOS is nearly 100% binary and API compatible with the Windows 2003 kernel, and that they are aiming for full Vista compatibility. Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time." In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally." Here are slides from Ionescu's talk (PDF), which might prove more useful than the video offered in various forms at over 450 MB.
...but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs ... the Windows emulation seems perfect !
How about a link to ReactOS in the summary?
^^
Not until all the malware works too!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
There was a minor scandal last year when the ReactOS project had to be suspended after it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code (which is available under shared source licenses in some contexts), and after a thorough audit the project continued.
The ReactOS people are taking the risk of copyright infringements very seriously.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This has inspired me to create a ground-up 100% reimplementation of the AOL client, identical in looks and functionality. Wish me luck!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Having begun the struggle with adapting application installers to Vista, I think I'd be more interested in a version of ReactOS that ISN'T Vista compatible.
Thinking about this:
"In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally.""
People at the Microsoft campus must be moving the furniture out of Ballmer's office as we speak.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either.
ReactOS would be useful for companies looking for a way to move off of Windows but who have binaries that only run on Windows. Due to the proliferation of VM technology, a VM running ReactOS on top of your OS of choice could make migration away from Windows cheap enough to be an option. If ReactOS is cheap enough, it could displace Windows by itself for limited applications. A free OS Dell or someone can install that still lets them get paid for crapware and which still lets end users run games and junk software from Walmart could easily grab market share away from Windows. Anything that threatens MS's dominance with Windows, whether it detracts from Linux or your favorite OS or not, is good for motivating MS to make Windows better. If Windows is as good as other OS's, I don't care if it is dominant as much.
So you won't have to actually run Windows in order to run Windows programs such as Photoshop, AutoCAD, and most video games. WINE isn't good enough for everyone.
"In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally."
Oh, please... While I have no doubts MS will try to destroy ReactOs when it becomes too popular, the developers have made painstakingly difficult steps to ensure the proper reverse engineering is done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box_testing ). They can sue all they want, they can't win this. (They can however make it an expensive legal wrangling...but then again, since it's open source, it's difficult to imagine any single lawsuit will be able to end the project).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
OK, I don't need to know this, but I'm an old assembler-head: I remember how much SMALLER DRDOS was than MSDOS. Microsoft makes bloated things.
I want to know how much memory ReactOS takes up versus WindowsXP. Has someone run it who can trivially answer? Did these guys make a smaller, lighter windows?
But you can see them here: http://www.alex-ionescu.com.nyud.net:8080/wloo-tal k.pdf
Wine offers a much more compelling method of migrating from Windows. ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you. Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wine
Is
Not
Enough
brilliant!
The incident had nothing to do with Windows source and it was certainly not minor. It was due to certain parts having been implemented by the same programmer that had reverse-engineered them and was consequently "tainted" if the project was to adhere to its principle of black box testing only. That programmer was the very same Ionescu as here. The result of the unfortunate incident was that the programmer that found out about it (Hartmut IIRC) resigned from the project and the audit that is still going on was started. I read some of the discussion about it on the mailing list and apparently there was a great deal of concern about Ionescu's contributions since they came too quickly and were too good to be the result of just blax box testing (but not all is available for everyone so there could've been something else as well that resulted in the conflict between programmers - the whole project was to some extent in jeopardy, though). The only thing you're right about is that they take copyright infringement seriously but that has nothing to do with that incident.
hey, that sounds mighty familiar...
WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one. I don't have any real confidence that WINE will ever work reliably for arbitrary software. It is a nice crutch for specific, common applications. It is a reasonable route to building a quick and dirty port. I don't think it will ever fill the role of a method of moving away from Windows and still running random (often proprietary or outdated) applications.
ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you.That is pretty much what I am doing now, except most WinXP licenses are not portable to new hardware and such a move is often accompanied by a move to new hardware. ReactOS is likely to be more lightweight than the current version of Windows and less likely to cause headaches with licensing and registration and DRM shutting it down arbitrarily. It also would have save my company a hundred bucks a license and that adds up.
Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.I actually looked at WINE and a couple of commercial WINE-based offerings and ReactOS before I chose to run WinXP in a VM. It was the most expensive solution by far (other than Windows outside a VM) but the only one that worked. In future I could see going either way, but I think the overhead from ReactOS is likely going to end up less of a consideration that the necessarily limited range of WINE.
Actually what happened was someone alledged that someone on the development team had decompiled actual MS Windows dll and binary files, and included the resulting code into the ReactOS codebase.
Unfortunately for the most part ReactOS is just wine that self boots. They borrow heavily from the wine codebase for their win32 api compatibility. Naturally the driver compatibility doesn't borrow from the wine codebase. The real point of ReactOS isn't software compatibility but environment compatibility. The goal is to be able to install all your windows apps on a machine that only supports windows (due to poor ACPI support in linux or poor video driver support or any of a number of incompatibilities). However windows application compatibility is rarely if ever better than wine with reactos.
Morbid curiosity. Kind of like when you drive past a car wreck.
...but free, secure and open source...
That doesn't necessarily follow. Duplicating a broken API will retain some of the security problems designed into the original OS.
What we DON'T have is a viable commercial product to compete with the PC/Mac control of the market for those of us who need to run professional programs. I mean no disrespect to Linux, and I plan to try out the UbuntuStudio as soon as it's out, but if you need to do video or audio/music production, for example, you're stuck with two platforms that continually underwhelm and have very little incentive to give users what they really want.
Both Microsoft and Apple have held the marketplace hostage for so long, that they can get away with ignoring the demands of their users, which is the symptom of a market out of whack. I want to run OSX on a box I build, but I can't. I want to run Vista without DRM, but I can't. I can keep going like this for a long time. It's the lack of serious competition that has kept the entire desktop market moribund for decades now.
We need another player, simple as that. We need a well-financed company to get into the desktop operating system game and stay there for a solid decade. Then we'll start seeing products and features that we REALLY want, at reasonable prices. Until then, it's going to be this silly charade of Bill and Steve, who we're supposed to believe are competitors, when they're really just enabling each other to abuse their customers, playing to their business partners in the entertainment-industrial complex. They may have done something at one time to move the status quo forward, but in the last decade they've just been a couple of jackoffs, doing zip for you and me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
/* Waste time to look like real Windows */
int i;
for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}
Engineering is the art of compromise.