Slashdot Mirror
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."
If you read the actual post, what this guy is doing makes a lot of sense. He's not re-writing ReactOS from scratch, he's just taking the parts of ReactOS that have worked out reasonably well (the kernel, bootloader, etc.) and tossing the stuff that hasn't worked out so well (the Win32 API subsystem). It just so happens that another project, WINE, did a really impressive job at getting that Win32 API layer implemented, and rather than maintaining two completely independent versions of it, piggybacking off the WINE work should make ReactOS usable relatively soon, and able to run a large number of existing Win32 applications.
Whether you think ReactOS is a sensible project or not, clearly some people think a complete, Open Source, Windows-compatible OS has some real value, and kudos to them for figuring out how to make that happen, or at least getting very close.