Slashdot Mirror
The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement
jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we've been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: "In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project's current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project's goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc...). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux's corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death."
It's an oddity, but why do we care about this project anymore? It started out back in '96 to be a clone of Windows 95. Then it was switched to be an NT4 clone. And every few years they update the website to say it's to be a clone of some newer version of Windows.
Meanwhile, it's still pre-alpha, (barely) runs on almost no hardware, and runs almost no programs. Wine is in a far better state. And in recent years, Windows' dominance has even been severely undermined by Android, providing a real, viable alternative OS that happens to be free and open source. And Linux has long since usurped it as the #1 server operating system. So after a couple decades of delays with almost no progress to be seen, ReactOS is on the verge of outliving its usefulness, before it ever started. Sort-of like GNU HURD for Windows fans.
There's plenty of open source OS projects out there that /. doesn't report on twice a year. Let's make ReactOS one of them!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
I'd suggest that it has also encouraged businesses to think very stupidly about in-house application development, which is where a lot of the problem is.
Essentially, lots of businesses created some in-house apps 10-15 years ago, which make use of quirks, design flaws, and bugs in Windows XP (or earlier) and IE6. Microsoft sat down to fix the quirks, bugs, and design flaws, only to find that they had to choose between dropping support and pissing off a huge portion of their customer base, failing to fix the flaws, or continuing to emulate the bugs for a decade in some kind of "compatibility mode". They've pretty much chosen a middle road that does a little of all three.
The problem is, this has only encouraged a mentality within businesses to think of application development as a one-off project. Management thinks, "Oh, well we'll just pay some programmers to develop a business-critical application, and then we'll be done with it. We'll get rid of the programmers, and the application will just keep working forever, because Microsoft will keep supporting all these whacky design choices." This is a very dangerous way of treating software development. Sooner or later, you're going to have to update your app. If you treated it as a one-off project, then you end up with a decade-long backlog of bugs that were never fixed, and a lack of any expertise because you've gotten rid of all the original programmers.