A free, open-source Windows “clone” – ReactOS – that has been in development for over a decade has caught the eye of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
A student at a Russian high school the president visited recently gave Mr Medvedev a brief overview of the project – and asked him for 1m euros.
If you’ve never heard of ReactOS and don’t know what it is, it’s a free operating system intended to replace Windows by maintaining complete hardware/software compatibility, with the added bonus of cutting down on unnecessary bloat (boot time is ~10 seconds).
In short, ReactOS is designed to be powerful and lightweight. You can think of the term “lightweight” in the good old fashion of Win95, a consistent user interface and small bundle of very common and useful tools. Although lightweight, ReactOS offers a lot in comparison to Windows 95, with an up-to-date experience as well as built from scratch on a rock solid NT core.
The idea sounds very promising, but the OS has been in development since 1998 and is still in alpha stage – not recommended for every day use and only a few Windows applications work correctly. However, the accidental meeting between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and one of the project’s developers (a high school student) could change that and have the OS reach completion in a year or so.
“Mr Medvedev visited a high school in the Stavropol region, and as a coincidence, one of our developers, Marat Karatov, studies there,” said Mr Bragin.
“So Marat decided to use this chance and tell the president about our free, non-commercial initiative, and he also quite unexpectedly said that for the project to make it to the finish line we would need 1 mln euros ($1,370,184, £865,578).
“And Mr Medvedev replied that he’ll think about it, adding that the project was indeed very interesting.”
I’d love for ReactOS to turn out to be a viable Windows replacement, but given the very limited resources of its development team I’m having a hard time seeing how that’s possible. I mean, Microsoft is investing billions in Windows while these guys are struggling to obtain just one million. Money isn’t everything, but having mountains of it will get you far when building a product.
Now it’s true that there have been cases of Davids successfully fighting Goliaths, but those cases are exceptions from the rule. Besides, would Microsoft really allow ReactOS to reach the public if it offered better performance than the upcoming Windows 8, at no cost? Keep in mind that ReactOS isn’t supposed to be a Windows alternative like Linux is, it’s supposed to be a Windows replacement.
I hope ReactOS will get the funding it needs to reach completion and will manage to at least partially live up to its performance/compatibility promises, but I’m going to remain very skeptical about it. After all, if it really had the potential to endanger Windows (even on a small scale), Microsoft would have bought them out by now.
partially via bbc
