Russian President Interested In Funding ReactOS 186
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.
Hey, big things have started this way (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire Soviet space program (and, arguably, the American one too) supposedly came out of a brief meeting about ICBM's in 1953 where Sergei Korolev [wikipedia.org] pitched his bigger idea for a space program to Khrushchev.
And yet another summary gone wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? Enthusiastic? President said that it is a very good and promising thing (considering a hight school student told him they were developing a free OS that could replace windows and keep old windows programs working) and made a joke that he does not have a million dollars in his pocket, but "he will think about it". You all know what this means/
Government's funding of projects (Score:2, Interesting)
Governments funding of projects, any projects, is mis-allocation of resources. If the project in question has any reason to exist, then there would be private funding for it, private lending, private interest.
Government can push agenda [go.com], but they can't make it work [usatoday.com] nor should they try [washingtonpost.com].
Either there is a reason for something to exist in the market or there isn't. Government commanding reasons does not work.