From the
‘
If At First You Don’t Succeed‘
files:
I’ve been writing about the ReactOS for at least five years (the project itself is more than 10 years old). It’s an effort to try and replicate a Windows operating system in open source.
Originally it was all about getting a WindowsNT implementation — which they never quite achieved — then it morphed to support Windows Server 2003. Again not quite ever really achieving a fully usable status. So instead of keeping up the same old/same old approach that to date hasn’t quite achieved all of its goals – ReactOS is now set to take a different path.
“ReactOS has been around for about 11 years, and it’s been growing each year since then,” ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin wrote in a mailing list posting. “Time goes by, new versions of Windows operating systems are being released. ReactOS usability still has not reached any significant value.”
So what ReactOS will now start to do, is to leverage the work that the WINE project has been doing on the win32 system. It’s an idea that makes a whole lot of sense, seeing as WINE has been working at replicating win32 for years (with some success, just look at CodeWeaver’s CrossOver apps) while ReactOS has been focused on win32 as part of a larger open source windows implementation.