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The idea behind it is to make an open source Windows clone. There are people that like Windows but dont like Linux. Back in the day, Unix was great but expensive and restricted thus GNU/Linux was born. There is an open source BeOS clone. People have varied tastes and you have to respect that.

I'm not sure I get it either.

First off, it seems like the minute they release, they'll be sued out of existence, and secondly, in all honesty, whose going to want to use something that is compatible with a 10+ year old OS?

whose going to want to use something that is compatible with a 10+ year old OS?

I would.

The last thing I *WANT* with my windows machine is to be forced to upgrade to Vista - I'd like to keep running windows 2000 or windows xp (i find both to be pretty much the same in actual usefulness) for a long time yet.

If an FOSS version of those were to an option - I'd switch to them

Edit: Nevermind that Microsoft themselves has been making every version of windows "compatible with a 10+ year old OS" and succeeding at it pretty effectively so far.

Edited 2007-01-08 16:18

I want to run certain Windows apps on my mac. If I can install ReactOS, I can run it virtually and then run my apps on top of it, all for free.

They can't be sued out of existence, as long as they don't use original Windows code. If eveything is reverse engineered, then there is no problem, just like Samba or Wine

Which of our "What is ReactOS" have you read? We have one short one in the FAQ page and another more detailed article labled with the same headline:

http://www.reactos.org/en/about_whatisreactos.html
http://www.reactos.org/en/about_userfaq.html

ReactOS is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface. ReactOS has and will continue to incorporating features from newer versions and sometimes even define the state of the art in operating system technology.

Linux has been the open source answer to closed source Unix (Xenix, IRIX & co.). ReactOS is the answer to WinNT/VMS series (which also covers WinXP/Vista, etc.).

It's pretty simple, it's always good to have alternatives. A lot of people are annoyed by operating systems which restrict their usage, come with inbuilt DRM, restrictive licenses, OSs that are resource hogs, etc.
ReactOS has been started in 1996, before all these topics were relevant. The ideas behind ReactOS are pretty similar like the Linux movement. The only major different is that ReactOS is a whole operating system were Linux is only the kernel (and kernel-libs).

And please don't forget the big masses of WinNT series compatible drivers and Win32 software and there is only one OS out there beside Redmond based monopol which support that; ReactOS.

ReactOS is a good thing for other open source OS's. There's a tendency for open source advocates to copy Windows just so Windows users can switch to free software. But if that's the job for reactos, then there is no need for other OS's to lose their identity.

KDE is moving to Windows...but that could then lead to KDE on ReactOS. And then people might move to KDE on desktopbsd or linux. In other words, it's a good bridge to another OS. It's an incremental approach

I think the first people who might switch to reactos are the litestep fans. Also people would stop pirating Windows, especially in the 3rd world. They would just use this instead and still get support because it's legit.