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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
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!
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.