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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."
I can see why some geeks would want to do it. I can't see why anyone else would care about it.
And that, folks, is why so many open-source projects never get finished, or improved.
He *should* just start working on WINE. Just because he can do whatever he wants, doesn't meant that his choices are good.
Look, I can guarantee you that ReactOS will never make it. It really has no meaningful audience, and when we get Samba 4, whatever audience it does have will walk away. Wine, as questionable as it is, does fulfill a role, but ReactOS's dream of replacing Windows was pretty nonsensical a seven or eight years ago, and considering the OS it's trying to replicate is now itself a decade old, it seems extremely pointless.
I'd much rather the effort be put into improving apps like OpenOffice and Samba which provide meaningful alternatives to the proprietary software the fuels the Windows ecosystem.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.