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Russian President Interested In Funding ReactOS
An anonymous reader writes "When Russian President Dmitri Medvedev recently visited a high school where ReactOS developer Marat Karatov happens to study, Karatov took the opportunity to present the open-source Windows-a-like to the President, and got a rather more enthusiastic reaction than might be expected — the President found the project interesting, and would consider funding it."
Be forewarned that the BBC article takes a few statements by the developers about boot time and compatibility out of context.
The entire Soviet space program (and, arguably, the American one too) supposedly came out of a brief meeting about ICBM's in 1953 where Sergei Korolev pitched his bigger idea for a space program to Khrushchev.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Be forewarned that the BBC article takes a few statements by the developers about boot time and compatibility out of context.
In other words, prepare to get your nurd rage on.
Luckily, Russia has a good deal of experience with producing largely functional clones of western computer systems, so ReactOS could be a perfect fit for them...
So far Microsoft has ignored ReactOS, and they have kept plodding along gut have been no threat to the Monopoly. If ReactOS gets enough publicity, and funding, then that equation changes drastically. You can bet that Microsoft will have their lawyers dusting off the patent archives to see what can be used to hold them back from being a serious Windows-like competitor. Only in Russia, they don't care about the US legal system except for any International agreements that they can not ignore. It will be interesting to watch, and I'm hoping the best for the ReactOS folks.
Good for this guy. I know nothing about ReactOS, but I'm happy for him. I dare say a lot of us are working on various pet projects that would get all sorts of funding and support if they were discovered by someone(s) capable of giving funding. As it's always been, it's about being in the right place at the right time and/or knowing the right people.
Why not follow China's example and develop your own official Linux distro?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
ReactOS endorses you! (sorry it had to be done).
But it has got to be one of the worst articles ever posted to /.
In Post-Soviet Russia, OS develops you!
That's not Putin.
Really? Enthusiastic? President said that it is a very good and promising thing (considering a hight school student told him they were developing a free OS that could replace windows and keep old windows programs working) and made a joke that he does not have a million dollars in his pocket, but "he will think about it". You all know what this means/
Governments funding of projects, any projects, is mis-allocation of resources. If the project in question has any reason to exist, then there would be private funding for it, private lending, private interest.
Government can push agenda, but they can't make it work nor should they try.
Either there is a reason for something to exist in the market or there isn't. Government commanding reasons does not work.
You can't handle the truth.
I guess we are just going to have to teach Marat Karatov to wear the ribbon!
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheSponge.html
I can happily say that I have donated whatever money I had spare in my PayPal account that I was unable to withdraw at the time.
Hopefully Medvedev can go ahead and sponsor this project and give it a much needed boost!
Though a couple of years ago ReactOS had to be suspended due to stealing code allegations.
all the viruses, worms and other malware?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Putin left the back door open, and Dmitri got out again.
In Soviet Russia, operating system funds YOU. For once it's actually true, since the operating system was communism...
I also think that the article hugely embellishes where ReactOS is today and how long it would take to be production ready. ReactOS has a very long way to go. Charitably, it's alpha status and likely to stay that way for a while yet. I still think it deserves funding however. The biggest benefit to Russia / China / whoever of funding the project is they can use it as a stick to threaten Microsoft in any contract negotiations. I don't think it is likely they'd follow through with their threats but obviously the more viable ReactOS is, the more impact the threat could make.
I remember reading a while ago that they were shifting their focus from a whole Windows clone to be something more like crossover office, instead of recreating all of windows from the ground up.
I think Wine in Linux has better compatibility than ReactOS.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The last time I checked out ReactOS, they had a nice software download app. A bit like you would update a linux system with additional software.
Looks like a good idea to me.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Immediately after noticing it was a tech article written by a woman.
I think one of the biggest reactos advantages is that you have all windows components - open source so you can modify them, just imagine Windows distributions.
ReactOS has also a ARM version uses only ~60 MB disk(ok without drivers) and less RAM than 2000/XP.
If reactos goes down, WINE will also.
I hope they get the investment. Wine will probably also benefit from the development of ReactOS.
In Soviet Russia Open Sources you
I'm going to tell the female Ph.D. in digital signal processing sitting next to me that you said girls can't do tech.
People need to understand already that humor is when you can make jokes and laugh at funny things. Do things that make people smile or smile when you find something funny.
Humour on the other hand is not the same thing. To understand humour, you have to understand that the term funny isn't referring "Oh my god!!! He was so funny. I nearly laughed my ass off and at one point damn near choked on my lung". In the case of humour, funny refers to something like "Hmm.... this fish smells funny... would you eat still eat it?"
Humour is based on statements that are either strictly ironic or sardonic. They can't actually be humorous. Also, humour is often so hard to understand even by the connoisseurs of "fine humour" that under all circumstances after a humourous statement is made, in order to ensure that the audience of said humour is prompted with some sort of explanation as to why it was in fact humourous and therefore the audience will understand they are meant to smile. It is also important to understand that humour is entirely dependent on a laugh track and cannot be understood or appreciated properly without it.
A fine example of humor vs. humour would be that in humor, a clown would entertain children by throwing a pie at another clowns face. The other clown would then begrudgingly wipe the whipped cream from around his mouth, then his eyes. He would the swing a big fish around to smack the first clown back in revenge, but that clown would duck and the swing clown would continue his swing and fall down. That would be humorous.
In the case of humour. Some bald guy would throw a pie at another guy wearing a suit. The laugh track would giggle a little in the background, something not too noisy or intrusive. Another guy would come on stage and say "He hit that guy in the face with a pie... that's funny!" at which point the laugh track would prompt the audience to grin by being played loudly and prolonged.
There have been odd freaks of nature within England (the Scotts and Irish in general are just damn funny, but have been forced over centuries to spell humor as humour as to allow the English to claim a superiority by associating humor with humour as opposed to adopting humor in lieu of humour) such as John Cleese who has managed to combine humor with humour to entertain humans and English alike. We have reason to believe however that he is in fact the bastard child of his mother and the Scottish man servant as the genetics required to understand humor are absolutely absent from the gene pool found in England.
To prove this, there will be multiple readers who either are English or sympathize with the English (such as those social oddities found in Vancouver) who will take offense to this post and rise to the bait and either attempt to prove me wrong or simply express being offended. The proof of this is based on the fact that they simply will lack the ability to understand that this is a posting which uses their humour as a the subject of my humor. Additionally, there will be at least one person who takes serious offense to American's trying to take ownership of a language they spent nearly a millennium hacking into the utter rubbish it has now evolved to and that Webster's attack on the precious Queen's 'ou' to abbreviate the far less efficient 'o' (remember inbreeding) is simply a spelling difference as opposed to a differentiation great enough to justify an alternative definition.
Yes and no. Most malware exploits holes that have been patched, so even Windows doesn't support it. Most measured by numbers of pure variants, not the number of copies in the wild. And of course third party applications will have the same problems on either system. Insecure Windows apps will be insecure ResctOS apps.
There are two camps in ReactOS development. One wants perfect binary compatibility, which means undocumented behavior and other quirks. Malware will like this. The other wants to follow MSDN documentation because that's what is freely available without much legal problem. Malware will be elss compatible with this.
Wine has a lot of unit/regression testing, and ReactOS uses that heavily. Write something on Windows, get the expected behavior, and make Wine behave the same. So user-mode, it will be very close to Windows. Wine does not do (much) kernel mode work, so it will be up to ReactOS group to determine what gets tested and how.
In summary, ReactOS will fall victim to any design flaws Windows has. It will not be compatible with malicious code that expects certain values to be in certain places (version checks such as the address of a function). It will also have bugs of its own which can be exploited.