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Russian Univ. Launches Course Based On ReactOS Led By Alex Bragin
New submitter jeditobe writes "Aleksey Bragin reported that starting in February he would be a lecturer at the Moscow State Technical University teaching the operating system course. He said that he intends to incorporate ReactOS into the lab work so that students would have the opportunity to work on an actual operating system. He also intends to translate and upload the slides he will use for class for others to see." (Bragin is the Project Coordinator for ReactOS.)
If the problems are already solved, then it's more difficult to be the one who solves them. If the solutions are already extremely optimized then it's more difficult to be the person who provides a better solution. Sometimes you want to repeat other people's work, but sometimes it's worth trying to be the first person to do something. A less tuned OS like ReactOS might be good for teaching on.
I'd be more concerned about the question "why use a complex OS like ReactOS rather than a simple one like Minix" since lots of the key teaching points could get lost in the arcane details, but again, there's also plenty to be said for showing the real world from time to time rather than just academic theory and using one thing doesn't stop you using the other.
The most important thing is probably the quality of the teaching and if ReactOS motivates the professor to be interested in what his students are doing then it's probably going to give them a better course than they could ever have otherwise.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Why not use Linux or any OS that actually works? ReactOS is terrible.
The obvious reason is Aleksey Bragin is a ReactOS developer and thus has intrinsic knowledge about the ReactOS system. Apart from that it could also be claimed that ReactOS is smaller and less complex, making it a good example to study.
> Its impossible to do this with Windows
If the course is focusing on Windows internals, there's a program called Windows Research Kernel from Microsoft, which some universities can apply to and get access to Windows XP / 2003 kernel source code complete with a build environment. So you can compile it and test any changes. It has the advantage of being bug-free (relative to ReactOS), having well-structured and well-commented code (I've seen it), and it being something that is being used by millions of people out there as production OS.