Every now and then, some blogger working for a big website will write a story about how company Abc should make radical move Xyz in order to better, eh, well, that's usually left in the dark. These are generally more akin to said bloggers hoping for radical move Xyz rather than there being a well-argumented reasoning. Radical moves in the technology business don't happen very often, but when they do, there's generally a good reason for them.
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Member since:2005-07-01
ReactOS is chasing a moving target. They would need to perfectly recreate an exact copy of a recent version of Windows in order for it to be of any use. And even then there would be too many things it couldn't do that the latest Windows could. They could never catch up, no matter how much money you threw at them.
The cost of creating Windows is vast. The cost of recreating it would surely be equally as vast, even given that you don't need to design it and even if you rely on the community for testing. It's never going to be worth the enormous, speculative investment of any or all of Microsoft's competitors. They've got more chance of Linux gaining a foothold in the market.
Don't get me wrong, I heartily approve of the project. I'm sure it helps with Wine getting Windows apps running under Linux. I just don't think that large amounts of cash would turn it into a real challenge for MS.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I have always thought that the best competitor to Windows, bearing in mind that people need compatibility in this world, would be a well-funded ReactOS project (maybe one of Microsoft's competitors could step in to provide finance...) If there was a viable F/OSS implementation of Windows and, importantly, that implementation was not controlled by MS then we might see it improve in ways that could not have been imagined before (in the same vein as the recent Mono on iPhone and Wii story).
I am also unsure as to why MS would wish to liberate Windows at the moment as there isn't really any market pressure to do so. However, this could be a good thing, because as long as Windows isn't open, there remains the opportunity for ReactOS to get its foot in the door (if someone would give the project the resources it needs to truly compete).