ReactOS 0.3.1 Released

fireballrus writes with news of the release of ReactOS 0.3.1 — press release, changelog, download packages. ReactOS is "an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)." The press release notes: "Please don't forget this is an alpha-stage operating system, which means it is not suitable to replace your main OS. Also, this release is aimed to be run mostly in virtualizers / emulators (like QEmu, VMWare, Parallels, etc): because of the big amount of changes, our development team was not able to test/fix all problems which arise when running ReactOS on real hardware."

Re:Cool project

[Anonymous Coward]

The legal issues associated with reverse engineering an operating system to run programs originally written for windows should not be any scarier than those associated with reverse engineering (clone) the hardware to run software written for IBM PC. IBM had deep pockets and a penchant for enforcing its large IP portfolio, but the cloners won.

Re:What's the point?

[dosius]

Keep in mind that they share a lot of their user-level code with WINE, and the WINE and ROS teams do help each other, this is in their FAQ.

-uso.

Re:Please don't forget that this is an alpha stage

[Original Replica]

What if, as it becomes closer to a release product, it becomes decentralized. Anyone who had done enough work on the original ReactOS walks away from the project perhaps with a public request not to use their work. What if there is no one person or entity to sue? Patches could be written for specific issues by the user community, so support would be distributed as well. Basically, is there a way to spread the legal vulnerability/liability between so many people, that MicroSoft would have to resort to suing thousands of individuals for very small amounts, with a limited chance of success in each case?

Re:How to Avoid Vista

[MBGMorden]

Doubtful. Reactos has been around a LONG time. They've always been very careful to avoid any actions that would be legally unsound. If you play the game right, you can legally clone a system and there's nothing that they can do to you. BTW, if they happened to sue ReactOS, WINE is in trouble too. Most of the Windows API code that actually deals with running programs they closely model on each other.

In any event, the whole topic is moot. If they sue based on software patents, then ReactOS can simply move the servers to a country that doesn't recognize them (and there are will plenty of those).

nice to see this progress but

[sentientbrendan]

my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.

What I'd really like to see is some major company getting behind reactos and wine. Getting a portable win32 layer really working to the point where it's no longer just a toy is going to take a major effort, more of an effort than the open source community seems willing to put forward at this time. Working win32 is a real possibility, but it needs a lot of people to get behind it.

Re:nice to see this progress but

[evilviper]

my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.

No. The projects are working together, and code goes back and fourth... That's kinda the point of Open Source, isn't it? If somebody else does it better, you use what they've written, in your own project.

A few of the reasons to use ReactOS instead of WINE:

Drivers. How well does WINE load that WinXP dll/ocx driver for your WiFi card? Display driver? etc.
Performance. Compatibility layer on top of another OS is never going to be as fast.
Interface. Everything is in the same place. If you know how to use Windows, running apps, and changing settings in ReactOS is very, very similar. No matter how similar KDE may look to Windows, it doesn't work anything like it.
Filesystems. Most systems may have FAT32 compatibility, but if you start using it for heavy tasks, the limitations and incompatibilities really come to the surface.

No doubt there's many more I can't think of at the moment.

I'm looking forward to ReactOS, if only because it will provide something Windows-compatible that isn't going to perform like a dog, and support isn't at the whim of Microsoft... I'd still be using NT4.0 if updates (of every kind) were still forthcoming. Instead, I'm sticking with 2000, jealously hoarding all available updates before Microsoft starts hiding them from the public, and hoping Microsoft won't be able to come up with anything in the future that will make it difficult to keep using old versions.

Re:Nice to see them plugging ahead

[vandan]

NT is designed to be portable, and Microsoft has ported it to MIPS, Alpha, PPC, x86, Itanium and AMD64 each at one time or another.

That's stretching the truth a bit.

The AMD64 'port', for starters, isn't in the same category as other 'ports' as it doesn't actually require any porting! There are optimisations that can be done. But is this a full-blown 'port'? Doubt it.

Next in terms of completeness is the Alpha port, which was abandoned long, long ago. Was it NT3.5 that used to run on Alpha? Something like that. And there was a tiny selection of server software / hardware combos that worked.

Next in line is the Itanium 'port'. I went to a Microsoft SQL Server sales pitch from Microsoft a while back, and they were demoing SQL Server 2003 on Itanium. The presentation was full of quotes like "Of course when it's complete, it won't lock up at this point ... hang on while I reboot ...", and other things such as "The whole DTS thing will run in 32-bit emulation mode, and quite slowly, for many years to come. We're having big problems getting this to work properly on an IA64 kernel." Now fair enough, this might be at least partly SQL Server, and not NT, but I think it's indicative of the whole shebang.

As for MIPS, I've never seen this one, so I can't comment.

And PPC? Are you serious? There's a PPC port of Windows? I don't think so. Maybe someone in Microsoft was dreaming of it, but I don't think this 'port' ever got anywhere.