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Anti-virus will be recommended.
It's not just the OS that needs AV protection, it's also the software that runs on it and the users which use it.

norton herpes antivirus?

but to be serious i have enjoyed playing with reactOS and it's onl gotten better.

yay for bringing politics into something that isnt remotely related! woo!

Well... I agree that politics should not be brought into it, but your statement that politics has nothing to do with development simply is bullshit.

Legislature, funding, research etc... are all areas a government covers. Stating that this does not affect a project like ReactOS in the slightest is wrong.

hey, guess what. The car industry also affects the development of reactOS in a round about way as well!

The point is that ReactOS is free and open source. Microsoft has killed XP in favor of Vista and Windows 7.

The remainder of your questions can best be answered by going to the ReactOS site and reading up on it. The roadmap is all laid out quite well.

Edited 2008-11-06 13:57 UTC

XP isn't dead yet...

Yes, the whole API is being targeted, including bugs, incosistincies, undocumented API, etc.

Wine has the same goal, the only difference being that Wine provide the top layer, ReactOS also provide the whole OS that sits under that layer.

It may have similar problems as MS Windows, but it's OSS, so it's free as in beer and as is in freedom. That alone makes me happy.

I'll admit to not necessarily agreeing with that viewpoint, but I understand. Open source is a very good thing, as it promotes competition and growth. But I have to wonder why, rather than putting their design time into FOSS programs that really could use it, they're replicating something that already exists? They're not trying to improve Windows, they're trying to duplicate it at least in the ABI and API respects.
I just don't get it, and that's my failing. At least Wine made sense to me, but this... well, to me it doesn't. This doesn't mean I think they shouldn't do it, it just means I don't get the point in duplicating something that's already there. As I said, I do not intend this as flame bate, though I'm sure I'll get my fair share.

The point is to have a free, open source replacement for Windows that is not under Microsoft's control, won't be end-of-lifed arbitrairly, and will run the huge catalog of Windows Compatible software.

I have tons of systems here I could give away to friends or to charity, but I can't afford to buy a $99US Windows XP license for each of them to do so.

Imagine a computer for impovershed areas of the world that will run Windows software, but no MS tax.

Imagine using ReactOS in a free VM to run Windows compatible software under Linux or MacOS X?

Imagine a Windows Compatible OS without the bloat and cruft that slows Windows down? ReactOS will run well on systems where XP and above are slow as sloths.

But your viewpoint is invalidated by Linux. Linux replicates an OS that already existed, Unix. It even used Minux's userland until version 0.12.

ReactOS is no difference then Linux, other than being based on Windows, and Linux was designed to be Unix-like.

Also, they can't improve on Windows, until they can duplicate the functionality of Windows. For a long time Linux trailed Unix, but now, I think Linux is ahead of most Unix's.

There is one huge difference between ReactOS and Linux. Linux never set out to be binary or even source code compatible with any existing Unix implementation.

That's not that big of a difference, Lots of OSS projects are binary compatible with their proprietary realtives, Haiku, for example.

ReactOS has no choice but to try and be binary compatible, as the source code for most of its applications are not available.

It was different for Linux, as the source code for 99% of it's apps are available, so you can compile it from source, or build a package.

It's just a difference in circumstances and implementation, not a difference in spirit.

Edited 2008-11-07 16:20 UTC

but Linus did set out to be POSIX compliant.

For instance, there are plenty of DOSes (MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, RxDOS, FreeDOS) as well as DOSBox or DOSEMU or QEMU or BOCHS or any (IA32) Windows. They all had different developers, licenses, costs, requirements, and some are no longer supported.

DOSBox, in particular, needs no real DOS but is (at best) a slow 486 and targeted only at games (and needs a host OS and lots of libs). FreeDOS was created to duplicate native DOS with minimal requirements and also improve upon it, mostly to have a free/libre version since others weren't (its kernel + BASE are GPLv2). DOSEMU is meant to run at near native speed under Linux (typically w/ FreeDOS) although isn't as good for multimedia as DOSBox (in my limited experience). Oh, and native DOS has limited support for AC97 while something like DOSBox just uses native OS drivers for that, etc.

Don't worry, WINE and ReactOS have their reasons, and they wisely pool their resources, so either way should hopefully be a viable solution in the future. Some people prefer the Windows way of doing things over Linux. (Honestly, DOS itself is hard to 100% duplicate, so I'm not surprised it takes so long for cloning Windows.)

Edited 2008-11-06 22:10 UTC

You assume everyone actually wants to replace their Windows desktop with Linux.

I for one would rather change my career and give up computers than swap Windows for Linux.