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.

Comments

Hey, big things have started this way

[elrous0]

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.

And yet another summary gone wrong.

[Pi1grim]

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/

Government's funding of projects

[roman_mir]

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.