http://www.osnews.com/story/178/Interview_with_Jason_Filby_from_the_ReactOS_Project Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:56:29 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? These inteviews about OSes that are still in their early stages are great They are a ton of fun to read. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 02:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm curious... why don't these guys just help out with the WINE project? Why reinvent the wheel? Wed, 17 Oct 2001 04:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? See that they have a blue.sys in their kernel binary tree. Now I don't have to pay $$ to see a blue screen. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 05:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What the hell this team doing? Does anybody _really_ need something like this? When ReactOS 1.0 Release will be ready Microsoft will already make Windows 3000, or something like this... It's simply stupid... It will be really better to help, for example, WINE project... Wed, 17 Oct 2001 06:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have search for these kind of Open Source OS's and I must say, ReactOS is the best I've seen. When you read the mailing lists, these guys know what they are doing and there is a lot of commitment by the developers who do it in their free time.
They have come a long way and it isn't just a project that's stuck or abandoned it's constantly under development, I like it! ;-)
Great work Jason and Co.! Wed, 17 Oct 2001 06:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ReactOS's MAIN goal is total binary -and- driver compatability.

Wine emulates the Windows API. This is a critical part of emulating Windows applications. However it does not emulate Windows itself. It does not, for example, make it possible to run your Windows 2000 nVidia geforce3 driver on Linux.

Wine is designed to be totally compatible. So far, Windows 2000 and XP are really just minor 'icing' on Windows NT. Once ReactOS is complete with NT4 compatability, adding on to build up to the latest OS will be -easy-! Wed, 17 Oct 2001 07:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Some files of Wine are pure Win32 code (I don't know how much). Those files can/will be used in ReactOS.

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There's also OWP (Open Windows Project - http://www.owpcentral.com) which has quite the same goal. I don't understand, why ReactOS and OWP don't team up. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The OWP project maintainer seems more interrested in being the project manager of an open source OS than writing a usable OS. The ReactOS team has asked the OWP team to merge, but the OWP team seem to don't care at all.

This is what the OWP team has come up with in a year:

ftp://ftp.owpcentral.com/Kernel/owp-kernel16-alpha4-12272000.zip

They have spent more time redesigning their website than actually writing an OS. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 09:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I can understand doing this for the fun factor, after all complex programming does give you a buzz, but it seems a waste of time, nobody is going to use it.

Why not get involved with some of the other cool projects out there that are trying to do something new, AtheOS springs to mind, or maybe OpenBeOS.

Just my 2 pence. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 09:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I wish them good luck. Coz' they gonna NEED it! Wed, 17 Oct 2001 09:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? doing something that some could see as pointless...
or commenting on it being pointless? Wed, 17 Oct 2001 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This must be the best OS for the future, if they make it.
NOT a Microsoft product but hopefully compatible to most of the Windows software.
Based on Open Software and not emulated environment.
Due to the legacy of NT architectur, multiprocessor support and better multitasking and memory handling than Win9X.
If they also add X11 grapics support then they also have all the Linux source compatible software available.
Perfect for the gaming community with Windows games.
This must be better then Linux, I'm waiting for ReactOS.
Why dont all the other groups join ReactOS development. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 12:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, I don't know if this project will work. Some years ago I have never touched or used a UNIX platform. But now that I have a LINUX platform I like it. But some people don't like UNIX because they say is too difficult to learn,

So they prefer to stick with Windows. I'm trying to educate the people about the new Windows XP (That actually is a trap). But hey what we gonna do if Microsoft discontinue Windows 98/Me/2000. I would be very difficult to people like me that my job is selling new computers.

Well, I wish the best for ReactOS. But I sincerely I will stick with Linux. Wed, 17 Oct 2001 12:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just some comments on what Jason said about minimizing discussion on design, and history of the project. I am one of the original 2-3 founders of the ReactOS project (long before Jason got involved I believe). It was originally called FreeWin95, and the idea came from Yannick Majoros (I cant spell his last name). After he left the project, we changed project leaders, and underwent a name change to WOS (Windows Operating System). When Jason became leader (he is a great leader, , we were Co-Leader's for a while, but since he did more work anyway because of my lack of technical knowledge in the low level stuff, I let him take over all leadership responsbilities, and became Beta Testing Team Coord.), anyway, we opened up discussion for a new name. I dubbed it ReactOS, because it was our reaction to Microsoft's monopoly, bleh bleh bleh....
Anyway, I just wanted to second Jason's comment that you need to minimize design discussion. This is why 99.9% of OS projects NEVER go anywhere. Freedows, which started around the same time as ReactOS(FreeWin95), never went anyone because of this. In fact, I think they split into two OS projects, and are still in discussion stage. I was a leader in that project for a while, before I realized it was going no where, and spent many long hours on the phone with Freedows founder Reece, from canada (the prodigy kid who was in College at age 14 or something ). If you want to go somewhere, you need to start coding from the beginning, and not spend years talking about design. It even took ReactOS a while to learn this, and any major progress didnt happen until we decided it was time to code and talk about design along the way (roughly before Jason took over the helm, when Brian was running it things started to get done). Thu, 18 Oct 2001 22:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If find ReactOS very interesting.
Wine plus ReactOS is more than the sum of the two. Thu, 18 Oct 2001 22:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sounds crazy, or like some linux zealots dream. However just as there are open source rivals to Microsoft there are corperations who have been working to dethrone them. I've heard of a GUI OS called aurora out of Japan. From what I have heard about its features it will destroy Microsoft with thier own method. Useless eyecandy and nifty features, like a AI assistent. You could tell it "Send finished work to jeff" and it finds what you where working on, checks the email address DB, finds the jeff you work with and sends. Mind you this AI program is represented by a human figure onscreen. Keep in mind this is somewhat vaporware as I have never seen a development version. Just the promise that it is comming, and America will be unable to compete.

So my question becomes this, what more will you do above and beyond NT 4.0, 2000 or whatever version Microsoft it pushing out the door today, to top international offerings? Or is this beyond the scope for the next few years? Thu, 18 Oct 2001 23:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Simple. ReactOS is a kernel based on the NT design philosphy.

NT's actual design is not bad. Much as people might complain about Microsoft, their programmers are actually fairly intellegent. I suggest you get the book 'Showstopper', about NT's original development.

That said, ReactOS is based on NT design, planned to be NT and Windows compatible. This is mostly due to the large amount of Software available for Windows. It will be GPL'ed, and open to just as much hacking and the like as Linux is.

That said, it's hardware support will be fantastic due to the ability to support NT/2000/XP drivers... and it could be expanded with a BSD/SkyOS style Linux emulation layer and god knows what else

But remember, it's still early. Fri, 19 Oct 2001 07:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Comparing Petros & Reactos.

They are not too similar. We have decided to not go for binary driver compatibility because it would lock us in too tightly to the way MS does things in the kernel. The OS would likely be hamstrung as a result, or we might lose our flexibility at least. We do use PE executable format for all system components though. There has been some discussion about driver compatibility recently in our forums and I've had to be firm in our direction regarding this. Jason is right in saying that we're mainly interested in the upper level win32 compatibility. We also have our native API which can be coded against. It makes for smaller memory footprints for executables so the alternative API could be useful in embedded environments. We want to explore the multiple API direction with API's customized to specific purposes.

Jason talks about us being able to dedicate more resources to a project when it is commercial. Overall, I would say this is true as I have more resources to call upon, especially ones like legal and other administrative resources. That doesn't mean to say that I don't get busy with other things too though. I have a life outside of software and I also have a company to run which can consume precious time.

The other advantage is that I don't need to contend with developer design discussions which have slowed down other OS projects. I suspect you will find that the most rapidly developing OSes are ones where there is a single developer who does most of the coding and doesn't bother with discussions of design and stuff. I personally am not afraid to try something out quickly to see if it works & am quite happy to throw away code that is obsoleted as a result. Some sections of petros have seen significant change over the past year or so because the way it was done before was inappropriate to future directions. We've been criticized for the lack of progress on a GUI. That's because, like Jason, I've been putting the hard work into fundamentals of the OS. A stable and powerful OS is much more important than a pretty GUI and the GUI is more likely to develop faster when I don't have to contend with OS bugs.

In my study years, we talked of several ways to approach a software project, and there were several models around at the time. There was the "army of ants" approach used by very large corporations - it was very inefficient because productivity dropped as you added more & more members to the project. Conversely, there was another approach called the "super programmer" model. This was where a single programmer was responsible for building the entire project (or large autonomous subsection). I heard tell that the Burroughs (now Unisys) B6000 series mainframe operating systems were designed and built by 3 super programmers. This model I believe still works today, and is especially true of OS development. I believe an OS is one of the more complex of programming tasks because fundamentally you are trying to create an abstract well defined user layer on top of a typically badly defined, poorly documented and often buggy hardware structure. This demands that all team members have an intimate knowledge of every section of the kernel, and how it intereacts with the hardware. Building a team that has such characteristics is a hard task, and that's typically why you end up with projects of one, or a project that has one key developer.

The other issue I'd lke to raise, and I think it's worthy of a feature interview is that of WINE. Now I would love to see WINE reach it's sweet spot, but I believe that it's crippled by having to use other APIs like X and the native OS API calls. If they could build a graphics subsystem directly into WINE and do a lot more of the basic API stuff closer to the kernel, it would be a big winner. My educated guess is that the way Windows does things as opposed to the way unix does things also is a large factor in performance and compatibility.

I've been asked to help with the WINE project several times, and also asked why we don't use WINE instead of doing our own GUI. The answer to the latter is that I would probably spend as much time writing glue code from WINE to the PetrOS API as I would by writing the GUI directly. The answer to the former is that very likely the licensing models of WINE and PetrOS are a bit incompatible for our requirements, and the risks of GPL code leaking could cause us a lot of grief. The prudent choice for us is to at least get our our GUI working and work from there. I would love to research WINE to determine how feasibile it would be to port a version to PetrOS, but the time we'd spend just doing the study is not something I'm prepared to risk. Because of this, I only have a basic knowledge of WINE and how it works - please excuse my ignorance if I have got things wrong.

To those more knowledgeable about WINE I ask, can WINE be improved to remove its dependence on X and Unix. If that happened, my guess is that performance and compatibility would improved and we (and others) would be much more interested in using it.

Peter Tue, 23 Oct 2001 23:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments