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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."
Does that make ReactOS the Vista of the open source world?!!!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
If it's based on Wine, why not just put their energy into Wine?
Because it's *their* energy to put where they want.
But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability
That sounds familiar
Actually, it does put energy into Wine. Reading quickly, it appears that it implements a shim underneath the win32 support in Wine, bypassing the usual Wine requirement for an X-Server. So they can work on the Wine APIs and both projects benefit.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Maybe they should rename it?
Re-ReactOS?
ReactOSRebooted?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Legality? Adaptability to new hardware? Free virtualisation of a windows hosting environment? Tracking new features as and when required, rather than needing to upgrade that (illegal) torrent XP? Offering an alternative to users of older hardware? The thrill of actually doing it? Just to piss you off?
Fortunately, the developers of GNU, Linux, Wine, Open Office, didn't feel that way.
Perhaps because one does not wish to engage in copyright infringement?
F0 07 C7 C8
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
As I understand it from the presentation, ReactOS would be able to do some things on the hardware level that Wine, by design, cannot do.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
So pay him, or STFU.
His freedom to do whatever he wants far outweighs your desire to have free stuff.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but if you want to run Win32 binaries, run Windows.
What version of Windows? The one that comes preinstalled on most PCs nowadays, or the one that Microsoft still sells? The last time I read the front page of ReactOS.org, the project's mission was to clone Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and specifically their device driver environment. (Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a different driver model.) Then you get to the issue where a retail copy of Windows for use in Parallels Desktop is no cheaper than a Wii-size Acer Aspire Revo PC with preinstalled Windows for use in KVM Switch.
But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability.
Wait, ReactOS or Wine?
Or as it says on http://www.reactos.org/en/about_whyreactos.html
"ReactOS offers a third alternative, for people who are fed up with Microsoft's policies but do not want to give up the familiar environment, architectural design, and millions of existing software applications and thousands of hardware drivers."
This is exactly why ReactOS interests me.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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!
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.
Because some people like the idea of FOSS. It took FreeDOS 5-8 years to fully clone 16bit MSDOS and then improve on it. Today there is a fully functioning alternative to DOS that is used extensively in the embedded space (particularly manufacturing subsystems where it's still common). By providing a fully functional clone of MS-DOS the FreeDOS people have removed the MS yoke from an entire sector of IT.
FreeDOS and ReactOS if it's successful are useful tools in dismantling the MS monopoly or making it more customer focused. Many of the DRM components in Vista and 7 wouldn't be possible if ReactOS was a fully working clone when Vista was announced. Now that MS has fully abandoned XP it gets even easier for ReactOS because they don't need to worry with MS coming in and rewriting a big chuck of win32 to obfuscate the development. ReactOS might just provide the necessary pressure for MS to dismantle the DRM subsystem in future versions of Windows if it begins gaining significant market share. This likely won't gain any traction in the retail market, but a successful implementation could destroy sales of MS licenses in the corporate climate, something MS would take very seriously as it accounts for most of the their windows income.
Nonsense. His freedom to do whatever he wants far outweighs my interest in getting him to work on something else for nothing. I doubt if anything outweighs my desire for free stuff.
You never used iBCS under Linux I take it? I used to use it extensively to run SCO, and other Unix binaries, on Linux (back in the 2.1/2.2 Kernel Days -- maybe even earlier) and it worked GREAT! I ran many proprietary, binary-only, serious applications on Linux that were only for other Unixes.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
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
What killed OS/2 was IBM basically blowing a 1-2 year lead on Chicago, not anything to do with Windows compatibility. IBM simply did not know how to market OS/2 Warp, bumbled around for over a year while Microsoft basically convinced developers to hang on for an operating system that didn't even exist (all those early "screenshots" of Chicago that first showed up in 1993-1994 were in fact artists' renderings). Even Microsoft wasn't really all that ready, as Office 95 was simply a variant of the 16-bit suite with a 32 bit wrapper. What's more, Windows 95 was an absolute horror story reliability-wise compared to OS/2. It was a piece of garbage. But Microsoft won because Microsoft understood the PC marketplace, and IBM had little or no understanding.
I know some of this because I was working for an IBM VAR at the time, and we saw just how inept IBM was, despite having what was, at the time, an extraordinarily powerful OS, with a powerful scripting language (Rexx), pretty good networking that included a full TCP/IP port, a fast and reliable file system and even it's own GCC port in the EMX system. I've told the story here before, but IBM was so bizarre that when they launched Warp 4, they didn't hand us VARs out OS/2 Warp 4 install CDs, they gave us a fucking movie that you played in a Windows machine. It was pretty much at that point that we figured out IBM had lost the thread of the conversation, and we pretty much abandoned selling OS/2.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would love to have a Model T that has been modernized. That would be so sweet! Oh, it must have the oooooggga horn too. Yeah!
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
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.
I still think, especially with Microsoft, there is some truth in:
“Those who don’t understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.”
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
Too bad you left Windows just when it got good.
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.
Actually, NTFS has allowed you to mount to directories for a decade or so now. That provides for more than 26 filesystems and also for nice names. As for backslash, yes it's an escape character in C languages. Linux uses forward slash, which is the default delimiter for regular expressions. Which gets used more often?
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.
Wait, you're a professional system administrator? Maybe you should learn something about the systems you administer. As it is, I can't imagine you do a very good job.
According to the manufacturer, it's by customer demand that they use Windows for the workstations.
I'm sure you never stopped to consider that there might be a reason for that other than stupidity. Windows can be far, far more productive than Linux for anything other than running a server or using the command shell. Two strengths do not victory make.
I can feel your point, but Windows feels like that on the surface because of a very well engendered Microsoft principle--backward compatibility.
.bat files well into 2010 (even though we really, really should have taken the time to master VBScript). Meanwhile, the more powerful, flexible, and truly modern evolution of that archaic CLI comes in the form of PowerShell, which gives you that bash-like capability and power contained in a CLI that was designed specifically for the Windows platform.
:P
The command interpreter that was command.com from the DOS era was integrated into NT5+ as cmd.exe, which many of us know, love, hate, and have thanked for allowing us to continue to run
The primary method to access a partition in windows is certainly via a drive letter, but if you do manage to go past 26 partitions, you'll get "A-A:," A-B:," and so on. Still, you can actually access these volumes in a more "modern" fashion by using their volume names directly (e.g. \\?\Volume{volume-guid-goes-here}) and not just the mount points they've been exposed on, or you could always expose the same volumes as a folder on an already mounted NTFS volume as well.
The thing is that many of the gripes more technical folks have had about Windows over the last decade have been solved in one way or another, but the problem is that since all of the old methods continue to work, there's little to no incentive for users (including systems admins, IT pros, programmers, and so on) to change our behavior, especially when we already know how to solve a given problem, irrespective of whether or not our chosen method is actually the most elegant solution.
I have to admit though, if I hadn't been forced to manipulate Linux based OS's in the ways that are required to get work done, particularly with respect to volume management, I probably wouldn't know about any of this stuff in Windows in the first place
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.
This hasn't been true since Windows 2000 (due to changes introduced in NTFS 5.0). You can mount a drive to a folder on an existing mounted file system through a process called Volume Mount Point.
Works just like Linux. Granted it's a little more buried to find out how to do it than in Linux, but not that much.
Not as bad as Windows driver support.
There are a handful of high profile things that do not have opensource Linux drivers. (NVidia video cards are probably going to get supported this year, despite the best efforts of NVidia.)
If you don't believe me, go check Balmer's quotes about Linux hardware support vs. windows hardware support.
Counter intutively, lack of a stable ABI has helped Linux develop the driver support that no other operating system is close to. If customers demand a Linux driver, it is so much harder to provide it as a binary instead of as source that the vast majority of the time the manufacturers either provide the source or documentation so the Linux community can create open source drivers, the net effect is that drivers for some specialized hardware is only available for Linux and DOS, there is also hardware that has Linux and Windows XP drivers, there is also hardware that only has Windows 7 and Linux drivers.
Work bio at MMWD
Let me take a shot at it.
The question was: Why wouldn't Aleksey Bragin put his energies into working on Wine instead of ReactOS?
I would suggest that what Bragin has in mind, as described by the summary and article, is a full open source operating system that would be "binary compatible" with Windows. He is "drawing heavily from Wine" in re-writing ReactOS, which had never reached fruition in the past.
There's a big difference between an Windows-compatible opensource OS and Wine. I can imagine a lot of people who have rejected the notion of installing another open source OS and then installing Wine in order to run Windows programs would be more interested in an OS that just ran Windows programs. For the casual user, installing Linux and then configuring Wine in order to run their Windows programs is not trivial. Imagine just having to install Ubuntu and then being able to install and run your Windows programs on top of it. That would seriously shake up the OS landscape, no?
I have no idea whether or not Bragin will be able to pull this off. I can imagine the obstacles are nearly insurmountable. But if he manages to do it, it'll change the world for a lot of personal computer users who are not fully satisfied with the current OS offerings.
I wish Aleksey Bragin the best of luck. I hope he pulls it off.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Needless duplication of effort is fucking dumb.
If you live in your mom's basement and every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner she cooks a great meal then you don't need to cook. For that matter reading a book on finite arithmetic is probably needless. But undertaking both endeavors are worthwhile. Almost all of schooling is going to be duplicated effort that is most definitely not "fucking dumb."
I doubt this guy "needs" a running copy of Windows to put food on his table. We must not forget that Linux could have been seen, for years, as needless duplication of effort. As humanity approaches levels of comfortable where we do not worry as much about our next meal, we have indeed found more ways to spend our time doing needless stuff. The first wheel spread throughout Eurasia very quickly unchanged. (See Guns,Germs and Steel.) Since then we have found ways to have fun re-inventing them.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I've been following this project for a long time and I'm not sure if this is still on the site or not, but back near the beginning of the project they looked at using the Win32 subsystem that was in Wine. At the time it was very basic, directly hooked into X and was using many hacks and things that made the use of the Wine code unfeasible. In about a month ReactOS had a better Win32 subsystem than Wine did.
At some point a group of developers working on the Wine project decided to toss the old Win32 implementation and properly implement it abstracting out the interfaces to X. Since Wine has more developers, they were able to find more that were willing to work on the Wine32 subsystem and it is now a lot better than ReactOS's. Basically they've taken a look, saw how much better Wine's implementation is now and decided to switch to it.
As for the already shares code part, ReactOS from the start used as many wine components as possible to give them a good start on their implementation. Every once in a while on the updates you'd see listed that the wine components had been synced back into the project. It comes down to that in ReactOS they need to talk to actual hardware, where Wine talks to X and POSIX.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Many things in Unix were designed correctly to begin with, Windows was not. Linux was never intended to be a binary replacement for any Unix based OS, but rather it was itself a Unix based OS. Trying to achieve binary compatibility with Windows (chasing a moving target) is not only unlikely to succeed, but if it does you still have Windows. It's like trying to create an open source Yugo. Maybe it can be done... maybe it can't... but even if you succeed, you've only reimplimented a bad idea. Even if you win, you still fail.
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.
His choices are good for him. What does your opinion have to do with it?
$ sed -e 's,\\,/,'
You don't have to use / when defining a regular expression in sed or perl (and maybe others as well), but you do have to escape \ in C/C++, perl, bash, make, python (unless using raw string literals) and others.
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.
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.
Yes, it did. The answer is, "because he wants to." No other answer is required.
This is a guy working on something out of passion, not because he's getting paid to do so. The question you need to answer is "what would motivate him to work for the wine project if his passion lies with the ReactOS project?" You can't just expect him to up and start contributing his free time to something else just because you think it's a more efficient use of said time. It's his time to use in whatever manner he wants to. In this case he wants to write an operating system, not just a windows compatible layer.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Following this kind of thinking, Linux or 386BSD would never have been written, as the Unix users of the past (mostly universities and big businesses) would have simply paid for a System V license and be done with it. It's exactly the spirit of challenge that has advanced the free Unices, and not just buying off-the-shelf licenses.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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.
You've accidentally illustrated the difference between hardware and software. If you had, instead, said something similar about a hypothetical effort to clone the PC XT, expressing your admiration for the architectural design of the ISA bus, longing perhaps for the "real true, and familiar, full length slot" of the XT chassis, and the thousands of add-in cards like 9600 Baud modems and Parallel Printer Adaptors that you could still pick up at ReCompute, people would immediately mod you into oblivion, and I wouldn't even have to see your idiotic post. But if you say anything, no matter how crazy, about software, it makes you a hero in the eyes of somebody with mod points.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
Any of that could be handled by a motivated distribution maintainer. That is to say it would be quite possible (and not prohibitively difficult) to build a Linux distro around Wine that would act very much like Windows. Don't like Unix permissions? Well, modern Linux has ACLs much like the ones on Windows. Don't like the Linux UIs in which Wine would ordinarily run? Don't use 'em. Don't like the filesystem layout? Don't use it. There is nothing about Linux or Unix that requires you to use that traditional hierarchy. Not even "init" has to be in its traditional location, you can specify, in your bootloader, what executable should be run on boot-up.
Where you'd start to see a real difference between an OS designed as a Windows clone and an ordinary OS repurposed to just run Wine all the time, I think, would be the infrastructure. A real Windows clone would be able (most likely) to run Windows hardware drivers, for instance, and its display and audio systems would be modeled on those of Windows. This could have real advantages, especially if what you're running primarily is Windows software.
Bow-ties are cool.
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.
Having read the summary, said a massive WTF, and then read the presentation, I can only conclude that the submitter did not RTFA. The story is not about rewriting ReactOS. It is not about abandoning ReactOS. It is about replacing a crufty subsystem in ReactOS that all of the ReactOS developers hate with one that is simpler, does more, and is easier to maintain. To which the general response is 'well, duh.'
Basically, the problem is that ReactOS tries to look like the bottom of the Win32 stack and then put WINE on top to implement the rest. Unfortunately, the bottom of WINE doesn't really look like the bottom of Microsoft's Win32 stack, so you need horrible code to join the two together. This code is ditching the old interfaces and replacing them with something designed to run WINE fast, not something designed to run bits of Windows fast. Given that the ReactOS kernel does run WINE, and not parts of Windows, this is an entirely sensible thing to do.
Most of the ReactOS code remains and is used by this new subsystem. Using WINE is not a new thing for ReactOS; it always got a big chunk of the userland from WINE. Think of the relationship between WINE and ReactOS as being similar to the relationship between GNU and Linux in terms of the final product.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So I see you've used Linux ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
None of those projects were "replications" like ReactOS aims to be.
1) GNU: GNU's Not Unix. GNU started as a bunch of work-alikes to standard Unix tools, but added lots and lots of new features. Later, GNU got involved with the GCC project, which is now the standard C/C++ compiler for many, many people. No one else has ever made, or attempted to make, a C/C++ compiler that operates the same across a wide range of CPU architectures; mostly, compilers were made for only one architecture.
2) Linux is only superficially a clone of Unix, and diverges from it in many places. It aims for POSIX compatibility, but that's all. Otherwise, it's forged its own path. It's also succeeded in being far more cross-platform than any other *NIX.
3) Wine is an attempt to make Windows binaries work in Linux by mapping system calls. That's a lot like emulation, and doesn't "clone" any particular product, and more than MAME attempts to clone arcade machines.
4) OpenOffice is an office suite. There's lots of office suites out there that are similar in many ways (after all, how different can a spreadsheet be?), but differ in others. OO.o never attempted to clone anything, just to work similarly to other extant Office suites. It also pioneered the use of XML file formats and especially ODF; commercial Office suites were late-comers to this idea.
There's a big difference between trying to make something which works similarly to, but better than (in the maker's opinion) something else on the market, and trying to make something that works exactly like and is completely compatible with something else. For instance, if I had endless free time to spend on a pet OSS project, I'd like to work on a PCB design program. I'd like to look at other commercial programs costing $10,000 per seat or whatever and see how they work, and maybe copy some of their ideas, but I certainly would not try to make an exact clone of any of them which was binary-compatible with its files. Instead, I'd make something that worked similarly, had many of the same features, maybe had some of my own features, etc. I might even try to provide features to import and export files to/from those other programs (all of them, not just one), in order to encourage migration. But I certainly wouldn't clone any particular one of them, especially if it had certain details that I didn't care for. In the end, I'd hope to have the best PCB design program available, and be recognized for that, not for making something that's just a knock-off of program XYZ.
There are other reasons besides cost to object to a particular product. I don't like giving my money to the maker of an operating system that puts the preferences of the biggest media companies before the preferences of their users. Both Windows and OSX are guilty of that. And, I hate on principle any operating system that thinks it needs 9 gigabytes of hard drive space. Yes, storage is cheap, but still, screw that.
Also, there are programs, yes, even some professional media production programs, that are Windows-only. The notion that OSX has the arts world sewn up is at least a decade past being true.
But most of all, I like choices. For certain professional applications, having to choose between two operating systems is just too limiting for me.
Finally, having a third commercially-viable, professional operating system would make the other two work harder and we might actually get a little competition in the OS space.
Oh, and I don't want a clone of Windows. I want an OS that runs Windows apps and has a few system management utilities and stays out of my way. Hell, while I'm hoping, it should be able to run OSX apps as well. I'd like to have Logic and Sonar sharing VST and AU plugins on the same machine. Fat chance, I know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They already have this, partially, with "ndiswrapper".
To render stuff to a video screen on Linux, Wine needs to use some sort of system API. It uses X (presumably because ignoring it would be monumentally stupid). There is apparently decent separation between the code supporting the higher level Windows APIs and the the code that does the drawing, but there needs to be something more there than what you are calling 'drivers'. The code will in fact be much like a driver, with some code doing the support for X, and some other code doing the support for ReactOS.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well, considering that he and whomever has been helping him have spent 11 years on it and is now gonna shitcan a good chunk of it and start over, I'd say that is good evidence that his choices are pretty poorly made and maybe Wine would be better without him.
But seriously, what exactly is the point? They are trying to make a free version of a DEAD OS. XP is toasty. It is two versions behind, walking into my local Walmart less and less support XP, Vista and 7 are very different beasts, which means anything they do likely won't translate over if they want to support a non EOL OS, it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, if he could get it out tomorrow I admit it would be very cool and I would probably load it onto my lower end machines to keep from dealing with XP licenses. But at this rate he'll be lucky if it is day to day usable in 5 years, and does anybody think XP will be supported by much of anything then?
When he started it I thought it was a great idea. Win9x was a buggy POS, and the thought of having a rock solid stable OS that would run Win32 was VERY appealing. But times have changed folks. XP was stable, and is now EOL, Windows 7 runs great and folks are switching over left and right, so by the time these guys get any usable code out it is gonna be like having a free copy of Windows 95, so what is the point? At least Wine and Crossover can be used right now, and can get the job done. Does he have any idea how long this rewrite is gonna take? Or how long until a truly usable version is out the door? Because XP is a dead end OS, and every day that ReactOS isn't released is one less day it has to be relevant. At this rate by the time he releases working code everyone will be on Windows 12 and the only place you'll find Windows XP gear is in the dumpster. Which I'm sure isn't what he has sweated and worked for 11 years to hear, but that is just the way it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
For anyone curious about real world practical usage:
H:\>mountvol
Creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point.
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path VolumeName /D /L /P /R /N /E
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path
MOUNTVOL
MOUNTVOL
MOUNTVOL
Agreed. Also, a lot of businesses have, for instance, expensive equipment that require old versions of windows to drive them. I'd much rather install a shiny new ReactOS on a new workstation and have active support forums than try to get the control software working in wine on Ubuntu. A lot of us want as few layers of kludge as possible in work environments, where hacking cannot always be easily duplicated by the next guy.
Yes they exist and they work in a similar fashion to UNIX mounts... but they're not universally supported, unlike every UNIX filesystem I've ever used. Most people using mount points won't run into the flaws, but there are a whole bunch of utilities that have had a spotted history with them; for instance in NT 5.x, the recycle bin is completely unaware of mount points, so host soft-delete files on a mounted NTFS volume and they become hard deleted. Similarly, before we switched to a SAN we used DAS on a bunch of windows 2000 file servers, and cacls would completely refuse to work on mount points. Microsoft's solution? Assign the volume a temporary drive letter. We also had problems (now fixed) with enterprise vault not obeying policy when running off mount points.
So whilst the capability is technically there, it's been far from universally supported in the past, with the upshot that conservative IT policies mean that volume mount points won't be used again in the next decade, and alot of the people we do business with won't support anything involving something that doesn't fit into the blinkered "one partition, one alphabetic character" worldview. At least with UNIX you *know* that everything mounted at /some/random/path/wot_was_generated_from_a_script will behave exactly the same as /home, because there's only one way to mount filesystems and it's been that way since forever, and didn't have >26 support tacked on as an afterthought when it became a "serious" OS.
(As an aside, what happens in *nix when you have more than 26 logical discs in a single server? /dev/sdx, sdy, sdz, sd...?)
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Telnet gets used for things other than remote terminal sessions. Given that it used to be on every Windows box from NT 3.51 on, it was often used as a poor man's netcat. How do you do that with ssh, and how do you do it with a clean install of Windows?
ReactOS used to "draw heavily from wine". However at the time ReactOS started wine wasn't as well structured or functionally complete as it is today. This lead to ReactOS needing to heavily modify or rewrite huge sections of wine's codebase. This project is a restart of that code with a much cleaner separation now that both projects have matured somewhat.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Why has not one of the highly-rated comments addressed the most important point thus far? One of the critical features of ReactOS is not that it runs Win32 programs (which most operating systems can do to a reasonable degree via wine) but that it runs NT drivers. This is a huge deal: you get full hardware compatibility with anything that has a driver for Windows, which means pretty nearly anything at all. Consider, for example, ndiswrapper (Linux kernel module that provides an NT5 Network Driver Interface for the Linux kernel); with ndiswrapper you can use most network devices in Linux even if there's no native driver, because you can just download a driver intended for XP and it works fine.
Now, take that same idea, and extend it to every driver, 100% compatiblity. It's not Linux underneath, of course - the driver stack has to be engineered for exact NT compatibility and who knows where they'll get their scheduler or memory manager from - but it's a completely open-source operating system that can run any Win32 program or any NT driver. In fact, if they implement the alternate subsystems (Win32 is a subsystem on top of NT, but there are others) you could get (for example) a Linux-compatible API on top of NT and run the best of both worlds (there actually already is a POSIX subsystem for NT, which I use to run bash, ssh, subversion, and more from within Win7).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Great.
I could also extend FreeDOS to run a custom Amiga OS system within, and there implement a Darwin compatibility layer, not to run OSX apps, but to actually implement GNU-Hurd on top of the Mach kernel Darwin uses, and there I could implement the Linux kernel running on top of the Hurd as a server, where I could run Wine to finally install Photoshop and have the best of ALL worlds.
Or, I could just install Ubuntu and fire up Gimp.
Trying to achieve compatibility with obsolete and badly designed systems is stupid. We should be focusing on developing better applications that run on Unix, not on building compatibility layers for the very same platform we want to avoid.
Off course anyone can spend their time in whatever way they want, but we have to differentiate hobbyists trying to run NetBSD on their toaster, or developing firewire drivers for AmigaOS, from real Free Software developers actually building apps for the real world.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
In the "underdeveloped world", where people struggle to find water, they certainly don't give two shits about copyrights or IP laws. That's why Windows is so popular in China and India: they don't pay for it there! They just buy it on DVD for $1 (obviously not an official copy), or download it. That's why FOSS and especially Linux haven't caught on in developing countries the way many advocates thought they would.
Only in America do you have to worry about the BSA busting into your business and auditing all your computers, and giving you a $500,000 fine. Elsewhere, especially in Africa, that's simply not a concern. People like that will have even less appreciation for a Windows clone, or any FOSS, than anyone here on Slashdot.
Is putty more secure than Windows telnet while doing this?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I doubt if anything outweighs my desire for free stuff.
I concur. I doubt anything outweighs AC's desire for free stuff.