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In case anyone is offended by the lyrics in the music track, I'd just like to state that contrary the 'reactosorg' username, this video isn't an official video from the ReactOS team.

I've requested video be taken down whilst the audio is edited. It will be back up once complete.

Appologies for any inconvenience.

...because turning down your volume was too inconvenient? I never get offended by things I can simply tune out.

no, it's just about common decency and trying to maintain a professional look.
Not everyone wants to be greeted by a flurry of F and N words and it's a little irresponsible to expect children to just 'turn the volume down'

Anyway, the revised video is now up. Again, appologies for any inconvenience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKUrXAW97WY

My sensibilities were far more offended by the "music" itself than by any lyrics.

Cool stuff.

Oooh...the children, the children. God forbid the "children" hears something that they might not understand. The ruination of this country (US) is precisely because of "the children".

On topic....Kudos to ReactOS team. Looking forward to Beta!!!!

Thank you for the video. I'm going to have to give ReactOS another try soon.

I'd like to know as well. Impressive progress nevertheless.

Windows comes with a myriad of base drivers which include both generic drivers and support drivers.

If ReactOS didn't implement these generic drivers then you wouldn't even be able to install ReactOS, let alone run it.

For example, without filesystem drivers you would have no way of installing the OS into the disk.
Without bus drivers none of your pci cards would work.
Without video drivers you would have no screen.
Without network drivers you wouldn't be able to get on the internet to update your OS with your prefered drivers
etc, etc.

There are core drivers which must be present and are not available via 3rd party means. These provide the basic framework and serve as a base for your 3rd party mini filter drivers to attach to. So for example the network stack is built up of various drivers like tcpip, afd, tdi, etc. We then provide the generic drivers for chips like pcnet and ne2000 so your network works 'out of the box' as they aren't freely available elsewhere.
You are then free to install your driver of choice at a later stage if you so wish.

Other examples are things like the base USB drivers (ohci, uhci, etc), serial drivers, parallel drivers, i8042prt drivers, pci drivers, isapnp drivers, acpi drivers, floppy drivers, etc. These simply aren't available anywhere to download so we must implement them as they are core to the OS.

Makes perfect sense, thanks for taking the time to explain.

As was said, there needs to be a certain amount of basic drivers in there that you can actually install ReactOS at all. But what the other poster didn't say and I thought to mention:

There are a lot of drivers in Windows and it would be very easy to just grab those, make sure they work in ReactOS and then bundle them with it. But the problem is that those drivers are proprietary and as such you are not allowed to ship them with ReactOS. Would be good if the drivers were free, ReactOS devs could cut quite a lot of development time then :/

How exactly is Wine more patent-threat proof than ReactOS?

Well, a patent protects an invention, or if you will "an implementation of an idea".

What this means in practice is that it should have been possible (and was) to get a patent on the formula for paracetemol, as an example, but it should not be possible to patent the idea of a "headache tablet" itself. So neurofen wouldn't infringe on the patent for panadol, even though both were headache tablets, because neurofen is a different formula and it works in a different way.

OK, with me so far?

Wine works by intercepting the calls a running program makes to the OS, and it determines if the running program is a Windows executable, and if so it interprets the parameters as if this were a call to the win32 ABI, and Wine then translates these to equivalent parameters for a call to the underlying Linux kernel and drivers. Wine does the reverse things with the results returned.

ReactOS works by passing the parameters directly to an entry point in a loaded dll.

In short, ReactOS tries to work exactly like Windows, whereas Wine tries to achieve the same things as Windows in an entirely different way. Wine is to Windows as neurofen is to paracetemol. ReactOS is to Windows as a paracetemol ripoff is to paracetemol.

Therefore, ReactOS is far, far more likely to infringe any patent, assuming there is a valid patent, on Windows ABI.

Mind you, having said all that, there is COPIOUS prior art on ABIs for Operating Systems, so IMO it is very, very unlikely that there is indeed any valid patents involved here.

Edited 2009-07-08 05:35 UTC