Re: [ros-kernel] Forward: "ReactOS is too limited"

[Eugene I. <ge...@my...>]

Now, that's a constructive discussion.

>   - why should people invest time and money on ReactOS?

To created an open source OS that is compatible with (let's hope) all
(commercial and free) Win32 software and win device drivers. I can write
pages about design features of nt/win32 that I think are superior to the
ones in Linux (and the other way too), but it's not the point. I think that
Windows will exist for the forseeable future and will be the most popular
desktop system for many years to come (despite all the recent progress of
Linux and Mac OS X), and  I think that having a windows clone is no less
important right now than having a unix clone. Plus, ReactOS is ideal for
someone who programs for Windows and wants to donate time for open source
development without first having to learn unix.



>   - how will ReactOS survive to legal actions from Microsoft?

Well, there are already several opensource projects that are intruding into
MS territory: Wine, LinuxNTFS, Samba, OpenOffice/StarOffice (+a number of
shareware msoffice clones) to name a few and there hasn't been much legal
action from MS. It may be that MS doesn't want to give these projects free
publicity or it may be just pointless to try and stop projects when hundreds
of people across the world have the source code. There are other

>   - isn't Windows too much of a moving target?

There weren't too many changes in nt kernel between Win2k and WinXP. Even
changes from NT 4 to Win2k are not that great. Same goes for Win32/GUI. Most
changes happened in server/networking components (ActiveDirectory, blah,
blah...), but these are probably not high priority areas for us right now.
As I understand the goal for the next version of windows is object-oriented
file system so we should have about 2 years to catch up with win2k.

ei