Russian President Interested In Funding ReactOS

An anonymous reader writes "When Russian President Dmitri Medvedev recently visited a high school where ReactOS developer Marat Karatov happens to study, Karatov took the opportunity to present the open-source Windows-a-like to the President, and got a rather more enthusiastic reaction than might be expected — the President found the project interesting, and would consider funding it." Be forewarned that the BBC article takes a few statements by the developers about boot time and compatibility out of context.

Re:Let the patent war begin

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Parts of the application-facing side of things are shared with WINE(since both projects aim at having a working win32 land, as far as programs are concerned); but ReactOS goes to the additional effort of attempting to duplicate the NT kernel sufficiently closely as to be compatible with Windows drivers as well...

Re:3... 2... 1...

[morgauxo]

Actually, ReactOS uses Wine's code. Improvements are ported back and forth between the two too. Wine provides the API, ReactOS porvides the kernel and shell where traditional Wine use is X-Windows and Li/Unix.

Re:Let the patent war begin

[Khyber]

And yet it does every thing I've asked it to do. I'm even rocking some Quake, and I can post on slashdot, I can boot instantly, I have no issues with multiple programs open, and it just so happens to be the interface OS for my research station at home.

Proprietary, but its FREE and it comes with tools to let you do things.

Is nobody a child at heart any longer? What happened to that drive to tinker?

Re:3... 2... 1...

[bhtooefr]

ReactOS's goal is to be a cleanroom engineered OS that at the kernel level is 100% compatible with NT 5.1 or 5.2 (I forget which), and at the userland level is 100% compatible with the latest version of Windows (so NT 6.1, but not for long).

There's some overlap between ReactOS and WINE, and some stuff gets ported back and forth between the two, but WINE takes some shortcuts that ReactOS can't take.

WINE also can't really support hardware that only has Windows drivers, whereas ReactOS can.

And, one development technique that the ReactOS developers are doing is, take a copy of Windows XP, remove a file, and develop a clean-room version. Work on their version until it's stable on XP, then put it in ReactOS. See what broke. Then fix what broke.

Re:Hey, big things have started this way

[MBGMorden]

To be fair what the ReactOS guys want to accomplish, to have a Linux that can actually run Windows drivers AND programs without hoop jumping, is ambitious to say the least. Personally I don't see how they'll do it without the Windows source code to look at but I wish them luck.

ReactOS shares code with WINE, but it is not related to Linux in any way (aside from being another open source OS).