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ReactOS Being Rewritten, Gets Wine Infusion
xlotlu writes "ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system, binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be a much too complex task, holding the project back. Given the deficiencies of the current implementation, developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch, drawing heavily from the Wine project. Bragin's announcement on the ReactOS mailing list makes a compelling argument for this decision."
Fortunately, the developers of GNU, Linux, Wine, Open Office, didn't feel that way.
Because some people actaully want Windows without the Microsoft licensing. Wine running on *nix or Mac will always be a different experience. Filesystems are laied out differently, permissions work differently, desktops integration works differently, the UI of the system around the windows apps is different. It won't ever offer the *same* user experience and its not enteded to do so.
ReactOs on the other hand could feel much more Windows like if implemented in a complete way.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So pay him, or STFU.
His freedom to do whatever he wants far outweighs your desire to have free stuff.
I have a couple questions. . .
* Why did it take them 11 years to figure out that there was a large degree of overlap between Wine and ReactOS and maybe they should leverage the Wine work?
* How much overlap, really, is there? Wine, I believe, depends upon the presence of certain Posix system calls, X11, Alsa, etc? That is to say, largely, if I understand Wine correctly, it takes a Win32 API call and basically 'maps' it to the appropriate Posix and/or X11 API calls, and fixes up/converts parameters as necessary (in some cases, maybe 1 Win32 API call results in multiple 'native' API calls of functions with 'smaller' functionality that adds up to the Win32 API). However, the ReactOS people don't *have* a Posix kernel, X11, ALSA, etc underneath. This is kind of why I always figured there wasn't much interaction between Wine and ReactOS. How is it that they can get around this problem?
Of course, a lot of corporate IT projects fail, too. Software is hard. It's a wonder any of it works at all, sometimes.
It doesn't mean they're bad either. Or indifferent for that matter. Maybe if you had a crystal ball and could reliably foretell which projects will have have been important in five, ten or twenty years time, maybe then you could make that judgment. But without some sort of prescience it's impossible to make reliable judgments. That's why all those corporate projects flop; someone in authority makes a judgment about which strategy to pursue and in five years time one or more of their key assumptions is shown to be false and the software is rendered useless.
Of course, the same thing happens to free software projects as well. The difference however is that the Free Software developmental model tends to result in massive parallelism. Lots of projects fail, some are unexpected successes, and the successes aren't always the ones you'd expect. Think of it as a sort of software Darwinism: lots of projects die out, but the ones that thrive are well adapted to the needs of their userbase.
Looked at in that way, the lack of central direction in Free Software isn't the flaw that many perceive it to be. It is something to be celebrated.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
This is the same fallacy as the idea that if copyrighted materials could not be distributed illegally that all those people would buy it.
People who work on pet projects would not work on the more mainstream projects. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that they don't.
I agree completely with you, but I think this is the best reason for joining Wine instead of trying to create a whole new OS.
I started working with Linux in 1995 and have almost completely abandoned Windows since 2000 or so. However, I still have to do some occasional work in Windows, and I always feel how painful and difficult it is compared to a Unix-like system.
Windows lacks the advanced tools that Unix has, such as the Bash shell, for instance. I'm now occasionally do support for an industrial control system that uses Linux servers with Windows workstations. According to the manufacturer, it's by customer demand that they use Windows for the workstations. They use Cygwin for scripting a command shell.
And how about filesystems? The simple fact that the directory separator is the backslash, which is used as the escape sequence initiator in C-like languages, is a PITA. Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
I could go on and on, for any professional systems administrator, Unix is far superior to Windows, there is no doubt about that. It's only for home computers that familiarity is a convenience, professionals can be readily trained to use a system that's intrinsically easier to use.
I somehow feel that trying to make a new OS that has exactly the same "feel" as Windows is like trying to make a modern car that has exactly the same feel as a Ford Model T.
If it's based on Wine, why not just put their energy into Wine?
After having spent some time reading his presentation it seems that they want to avoid the dependency on X Windows that Wine apparently has. Thy main aim is to come up with a bootable version of WINE such that you can avoid the overhead of effectively running two operating systems. They also hope this will allow them to use certain drivers that WINE cannot as they want lower level access to the hardware than X Windows will ever provide.
Please not I am not an expert on any of this so please do correct me if I am wrong, but I did see some value in their approach since it is rather a lot of work to get Linux install up an running on an old PC if all you want it for is to run a few legacy windows applications and nothing else.
The idea of getting both groups contributing to the WINE higher level code also does now add to the WINE pool of developers too. This could actually help both projects considerably. So in a way, they are going to be putting their energy into WINE. They are not planning to fork the WINE source, they want to do regular merges into their tree. He quotes that it only takes 30 minutes to to this on a fresh WINE snapshot. It might then take a little longer to fix their code to take into account of changes in WINE but this is still pretty good.
It is thing like this that are only really possible with Open Source.
I dont read
The poster did not question his freedom to do so. He asked _why_ he would contribute to one particular project rather than another project. Your reply did not answer the question that was asked.
Slashdot moderators will give you +1 Informative for defending someone's freedom, but since they didn't attack his freedom you failed to answer the question. Wine and ReactOS are both free. So in neither case is he getting paid, and in neither case is anyone's freedom limited.
Wine didn't always have that separation between X and the Win32 API. It took quite some time for the project to reach the point where it would have been feasible to take just the Win32 specific parts and plug them into ReactOS. Specifically, 11 years ago it would have made a lot more sense to design things the way the ReactOS ended up implementing their Win32 layer rather than use use Wine's implementation.
I've been following both projects for many years (since 1994 or so for Wine) and neither project made the colossal mistakes that people seem to think that they did - it may seem that way in hindsight, but given what was available at the time when the decisions were made, they made perfect sense.
Wine won out in the marketplace because its design allowed it to get some applications running with relatively little work. Getting every last detail of the Windows platform implemented proved to be very difficult, though. ReactOS promised to offer a way to solve those last niggly details relatively easily, but the need to solve them was pushed so far into the future that nobody found the idea all that exciting. Plus, just getting a usable desktop environment running with ReactOS proved to be a massive undertaking, one that the Wine project didn't have to tackle at all. Add to that the work needed to write drivers for real hardware, a minimal set of tools that you'd need to run ReactOS as your OS, and probably a few hundreds of really important pieces that you would need to get anything done with it, and you're looking at a huge amount of work.
Even if ReactOS never ends up as a viable desktop OS, I can see a possible future for it as the Windows NT replacement of choice for embedded systems, similar to what FreeDOS ended up.
You keep using that word, "solved." I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
And that, folks, is why so many open-source projects never get finished, or improved.
Indeed, but it is also why practically all successful open source projects are successful: because the core people are passionate about their pet project and care about it.
I mean, to take your rational thinking to the extreme, there should be just one open source OS, one open source office suite, one open source browser, one open source desktop... That would be sensible, everybody working toward common single goal!
Except that never got humanity far anywhere. Humans need competition, antagonism, personal passion, or they will only produce mediocre results at best.
Nevertheless, I think it's not unreasonable, conversationally, to call into question whether what he's doing is really sensible.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation as to whether or not ReactOS is a sensible project, in the sense of whether or not you think it would be useful to anyone. What is not reasonable to do is claim that this developer in particular should go out and do something else in his free time because this something else would be more useful to the population at large.
I do plenty of things with me free time that is not useful to absolutely anyone. I watch movies, I play video games. What you're doing is akin to saying, "you shouldn't be watching movies, you should be reading up some technical manuals that would increase your skillset and make you more useful to your employer. Sure, we can both agree that would be a more productive use of my time, but that does not mean in any way that we agree that's what I *should* be doing with my time. My goal for my time does not match yours, and I'd rather just watch my damn movie.
To me, it's not. I can't think of something I'd personally be less interested in than running a clone of MS Windows.
Good for you. I even agree with that statement. It's just not relevant to the original statement which said this guy "*should* just start working on WINE." That's not how your free time projects work. You don't do the most productive thing, or the more efficient thing, or what helps the most people. None of that is relevant at all. You do what you want to do, because it's what you want to do. He sees some value in ReactOS we don't and that's what matters.
Seriously, if you want to ask the question, "why would anyone use ReactOS," which appears to be the question you're really interested in, go ahead. It's a good question, might get some interesting answers. Implying the developer should go do something else for free just because it'd be more useful to us is just selfish. Why should he care which project benefits us more?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Last night I was browsing the web on my Windows XP partition, which I usually use solely for gaming. It's completely up to date, and I'm running the RC of Firefox 3.6. I was viewing a web page and the browser crashed, and things started popping up, and my desktop wallpaper changed. It seems that Internet Security 2010 was silently installed on my PC through a buffer overflow in some Firefox module (I suspect an adobe plugin, but that's neither here nor there).
You want to know why *nix operating systems have inherently better architecture? You don't have to be an admin to use your computer, and userspace programs don't have the power to do to my PC what IS2010 did to me last night. Windows was always designed to be a single user system, and although that's improving, it's still obviously just stapled on top of the OS, because they don't want to break backward compatibility.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).