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."
Making it not crash would be moving away from emulating windows, I guess?
Just over 5120 more revisions to go until a nice round number!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
of the same strategy that Bill Gates developed in the '90s to defeat Netscape, Lotus, and the other leading PC application software vendors.
Microsoft deliberately made the architecture of Windows so byzantine, baroque, and spaghetti-like that even their own in-house staff of tens of thousands of developers could barely make sense of it, let alone outsiders who had their own platforms and APIs to develop and master. Now as the world has pivoted to mobile computing, this '90s strategy is biting MSFT in the butt. Bye, bye Steve! Bet you wish you had a properly designed OS kernel now!
That is quite a lot of commits, but then I suppose it would need a lot if it is going to be bug for bug compatible!
Will there be a Ballmer emulator as well? I could use one of those in my stock market crash simulator.
ReactOS takes an initiative and gets part of its kernel rewritten in c++ ...
...
Aleksey Bragin, the project coordinator writes:
"Monstera is a new implementation of a memory manager (along with a cache manager) compatible with the ReactOS kernel at source code level and providing the same binary compatible Native API through a lightweight wrapper. Monstera is implemented in a subset of C++ programming language.
Key ideas:
1. Object oriented language for object oriented kernel. When NT was implemented, C++ wasn't that good.
4. Don't drift away too much. It's still based on NT architecture, but think of it as if Microsoft Research would decide to reimplement NT in C++ for fun."
I had always assumed that Alex Ionescu was Romanian. But he says he was born in Canada in this video.
You know that Micro$oft will "react" quite badly to this. It's one thing to be Linux where the look and feel is totally different, but if you manage to get a reverse engineered solution for Windows even close to viable, the long knives will come out.
I foresee one of two things happening... 1. The project fails because it is TOO large for the possible gains it could provide and takes too long to get working. 2. The project is successful but M$ kills it by FUD and actual legal action. Both of these are equally possible. If the second option happens, I give them about a snowballs chance of going head to head with M$ and coming out with a commercially viable Windows clone.
Good luck storming the castle boys!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What a waste of a carrier...
I made God's Temple, just like Solomon. I have a 100,000 line of code cap forever. I will always break backward compatibility for perfection. Mine is 64-bit, ring-0-only.
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
Gotta hand it to the guy, he's got some tenacity.
A spin-off of a previous attempt to clone Windows 95, development started in early 1998, and has continued with the incremental addition of features already found in Windows.*
[*] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
reactos was the real reason why i ported samba-tng to w32, using mingw32 to compile it up. worked absolutely great. unfortunately you cannot effectively run samba-tng/w32 under windows (without changing the port numbers) because the ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 as well as the critical NamedPipe services are already occupied... by microsoft's implementation of SMB as well as microsoft's implementation of the critical MSRPC logon services (LSASS, NETLOGON and so on) without which it would be flat-out impossible to even log in to the box in order to see if the services were running!
likewise unfortunately because wine has had to implement MSRPC (completely independently), although it would run successfully you likewise would have to change the MSRPC pipe service names as well as the TCP and UDP port numbers of the endpoint mapper (port 135) because wine has had to implement \PIPE\winreg, \PIPE\srvsvc and many others which are *also* implemented in samba-tng.
the amount of cross-over between samba, wine and reactos at the core fundamental networking level (much of NT's design was based around networking and RPC services, even when run as a stand-alone system), is just crazy. especially when you consider that it takes about 250,000 lines of hard-core intensive c code just to get even the _fundamentals_ of MSRPC correct. it's been over twelve years so i've had to stop letting people know about the duplication of effort and just let them get on with spending their time learning the hard way that they're working on exactly the same thing... without sharing any effort between them.
there's some absolute golden nuggets in amongst the wine/reactos code. periodically - every few years - i have a go at extracting the DCOM implementation from wine - to build a stand-alone GNU/Linux + w32 DCOM library. the last person who tried that called it "TangramCOM". he forgot to commit some critical bits to the repository (such as the IDL compiler). if anyone's ever worked with DCOM at a high level (using e.g. python) you'll know that it's just stunningly easy. DCOM was - still is - why microsoft has been so insanely successful after all this time. the equivalent in the MacOS world is ObjectiveC, which achieves similar results (without the networking) at the compiler-level which is pretty ambitious and nuts but highly effective all the same.
ahh, what can you do, eh?
When Windows is used in the enterprise it's used generally because the stake holders buy into the commercial software model and have beliefs that systems backed by giant companies (be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc...) provide less risk. When a project ends up in flames at least they have a lifeline to call. Well, that is the perception. We know it doesn't really play out like that most of the time. If you're a stake holder in the other camp (lean start up, et al) then you're on an Linux based open source stack and taking advantage of the maturity of that open ecosystem. So I don't know where this would fit. I guess I could see Oracle or IBM funding it and trying to grow it to a point they could offer it as another option. Outside the enterprise Windows is just a walking dead OS.
Sounds like a MORE useless version of WINE which is itself useless. Sort of like a remake of the Trabant. An interesting exercise but ultimately pointless.
Good point, but this project, if successfully implemented, is more likely to catch on than the gazillion Linux distros out there, given that:
Only thing I think - this project should have 2 parts - one for win32, another for win64. The former should aim to be an FOSS XP, while the latter should aim to be an FOSS Windows 7. After all, Windows 7 loses some of its XP compatibility, which is why you have things like VirtualPC from Microsoft. In this case, just make the 2 completely separate, and let one run win64 apps on the 7 clone, and win32 apps on the XP clone. That way, one is also likely to meet the resource constraints of the OS.
They do need to have a proper team and a realistic deliverable target. And remember, they won't be playing catch-up w/ Microsoft, since Windows 7 is good enough, so they won't need to make an FOSS Windows 8. Once the FOSS 7 is made, they'd have done a good chunk of the work. Anyone can try to be a Red Hat to this software, and that alone will make them competitive w/ Microsoft.
At 480p the text is kind of hard to read ...
Interesting to see their testing methodology and how their massive code base broke a lot of build systems!
They've already audited their code in case of such accusations
Could I have that in plain English?
I come here for the love
Simplify. Do just these two things in one product and you've got a winner.
I come here for the love
From their site:
"ReactOS 0.3.15 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is recommended only for evaluation and testing purposes."
Aiming for that 2018 milestone I see.
Why do they want to create an open source replacement for Windows? Windows is a moving target. They may have a good answer, but at first glance the question of "why" comes to mind.