
ReactOS was selected for Google Summer of Code 2016 - jeditobe
http://www.reactos.ru/project-news/reactos-participation-google-summer-code-2016
======
riscy
Given Microsoft's recent moves towards a freemium desktop operating system,
with its numerous privacy concerns and baked in advertising, it's great to see
an actively developed alternative for those who make use of software
originally developed for Windows. Lock-in is a terrible thing.

~~~
aikah
> Given Microsoft's recent moves towards a freemium desktop operating system

It's not even free. New computers still pay licenses for windows 10. The
"free" upgrade offer ends in July.

~~~
riscy
Oops, yea, I really meant the whole Windows-as-a-service direction. I could
see Microsoft extending the free offer, though, since they appear to be
aggressively pushing people to enroll in the service.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Free shmee. The Win7/8/8.1 license that grants you a free _upgrade_ sure
wasn't free.

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skyyler
For most end consumers who didn't realize that they paid for a windows license
when they bought their computer, it's just a free upgrade, no different than
their iPhone updating.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Indeed, and I'm definitely not complaining that Win8 SP2 is a free upgrade
from Win7+ ;) Still, only holders of existing Windows licenses qualify for it
- "Windows for free" is something different, IMNSHO. But you are quite correct
that an average consumer would see this distinction as pointless nitpicking.

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orionblastar
ReactOS is a cool idea. Use WINE to create a Windows compatible FOSS Operating
System. They aim for XP/2003 compatibility so it doesn't run a lot of newer
stuff. But it is good for legacy Windows apps. With the 0.4.0 release they
added more driver support, Wifi support, Audio support, etc. They need more
people to work on it, and I hope that Google funds them some money as well to
pay people.

So far it is in the alpha stage and needs to go to beta stage soon. It only
has a 48M overhead and loads faster than the real Windows. It has EXT file
system support as well as FAT support but NTFS is read only.

Someone can make a ReactOS bundle with PHP, MySQL, Apache2 so it can be used
as a web server. If someone ports CLRNET or the Dotnet open source programs
over to it, it can run ASP.Net stuff as well.

~~~
pizza234
You're severely underestimating the massive amount of resources needed to
accomplish such target, especially when compared to what the target it.

There isn't much point in throwing a massive amount of resources for building
an AMP hosting environment. If somebody needs to start an AMP server from
scratch and he really needs to save money, there is LAMP.

The only realistic use case of ReactOS is large-scale deployments of machines
which need Windows (driver) compatibility, in which case ReactOS would save
large amounts of money.

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freeqaz
The Project Proposal page has a list of potential items for people to work on.
Pretty interesting!

[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2016_Idea...](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2016_Ideas)

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tbolt
For the love of god, leave scrolling alone.

~~~
mikejmoffitt
Seconding this. Websites shouldn't push a preference like that on users.

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lugus35
The problem with ReactOS is its lack of automatic or semi-automatic OS update.

There is plan to do it, but from what I understand, it's still not available:

[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Update](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Update)

Security is another major problem with this OS. They are proud to have produce
9M LoC, but they don't advertise how they assure this code is not full of
vulnerabilities.

Do they audit the code ? Do they use static analysis tools ? Do they have
specifics security practices and processes ?

I don't see any security advisory on their page. I only see a wishlist on
their wiki
[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Security](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Security)

~~~
zymhan
> The problem with ReactOS is its lack of automatic or semi-automatic OS
> update.

Among many other reasons why you shouldn't use it as your main OS. But not
even the React Devs would suggest that you do, so I'm not sure what your point
is. It's clearly still in the development stage and is almost certainly just
going to be run in a VM for the time being anyway.

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jensvdh
Jesus. What kind of "smoothscroll" is applied to that site? It's super
annoying.

~~~
eggy
In a recursive fashion, I had to scroll past all of the comments against
hijacked scrolling to get to the first comment about the subject matter. This
is not the first time on HN I have had to do this. Maybe a single comment,
without all of the piled on comments would lessen this distraction? My intent
is serious, and I hope not taken the wrong way, but the irony is there.

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jadavis
Read this headline and thought, "First React Native, and now ReactOS. What'll
they think of next?"

~~~
eggy
Yes, I also have to do a 'double-take' on these names. I know it's not the
point of your comment, but ReactOS started first for those who don't know
already.

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_yosefk
Why doesn't Google make a free, compatible Windows clone, for the same reasons
Microsoft as well as Google made free, compatible browser clones? I honestly
don't understand it.

~~~
pjc50
Because that's an enourmous amount of work and likely to attract hostile legal
action? They didn't even create their own operating system for their phones.

~~~
_yosefk
Why then does MS work on Bing? Bing is more likely to infringe on Google's
patents than a Windows clone is likely to infringe on MS's patents, not? And
Bing is certainly lots of work.

~~~
pjc50
There isn't an API issue there though, and it's not required to work in the
same way so it's hard to say that it's more likely to infringe patents.

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trymas
note: it's just a complete nitpick, but I just have a question

In the front page of ReactOS[0]:

> 9,000,000+ lines of code

> And growing!

Is the huge and growing codebase a pro or a con?

[0] [http://www.reactos.ru/](http://www.reactos.ru/)

~~~
FnuGk
I think it implies that the project is active

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djsumdog
ReactOS has been going at this problem for a loooong time. It's a pretty
amazing initiative, and the fact that it's taken so long goes to show how
insane a kludge Windows is under the surface.

I wonder if the reason we haven't seen more work on ReactOS compared to Linux
development is the commercial backing that Linux development receives from the
big guys (Red Hat, IBM, et. al.) I wonder if people are wearisome of funding
ReactOS beacuse of Microsoft.

~~~
ericflo
Why does the fact that it's taken so long show how insane a kludge Windows is,
rather than indicating that there is simply a lot of work to recreate?

~~~
thanksgiving
While I'd love to throw poop at Microsoft, I think this is correct. If someone
had to create an operating system that accepted GNU/Linux binaries without the
benefit of looking at internal communication or the source code, I bet it
would take many years as well.

~~~
AstralStorm
Accepting binaries is relatively easy, you can often stub features and have
the thing mostly work. See Wine project. Accepting drivers is super hard and
this is the main part of ReactOS - the kernel.

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hazelnut
Sorry, but the scrolling of the page is just confusing.

Even if it was done with a good and helpful intend. For a lot of people it's
pure pain if you take control of the scrolling.

~~~
currysausage
I hate to bikeshed, but the amount of wasted vertical screen space [1] makes
me almost a little angry. Web designers: if you think it's a good idea to
reimplement basic browser functionality (scrolling), or to emulate the UX of
HTML frames, please think again.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/IUEqFj7.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/IUEqFj7.jpg)

~~~
ank_the_elder
So many mobile sites implement this same unpleasant UI control where the
header follows your scrolling and stubbornly takes a portion of the screen
without adding any useful functionality, that I wonder if people know it's
possible to scroll to the top of any page and see the header there...

~~~
happyslobro
I tried to explain the retardedness of this to management, before it was
implemented. They were like "but people share more when the widgets are always
visible, we A/B tested this!" It's like talking to a rock sometimes.

~~~
jacobush
Who is the rock?

~~~
chris_wot
The more responsive and thoughtful of the two, it appears.

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simonebrunozzi
From their webpage: "Nearly ten years ago the ReactOS Project released version
0.3.0. Today we are proud to announce the formal release of version 0.4.0. ".

This is the problem. Going from 0.3 to 0.4 in TEN years means that you cannot
be commercially successful.

As much as I admire ReactOS' contributors and their efforts, I have little
faith in their ability to make a dent in the market.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I really don't understand why the downvotes. Can someone explain?

~~~
reitanqild
As outworlder pointed out being commercially successful does not seem to be a
requirement to be accepted for GSOC.

