ReactOS
October 17th, 2006 by Oliver
My investigations of MythTV and Mono has led me to a few interesting things regarding Linux and operating systems. One of the more interesting, although not immediately useful to most people, is ReactOS.
It’s simply an attempt to create an operating system from scratch that is binary compatible with Microsoft Windows. That is it will be able to run Windows binaries (executables and DLLs). It’s far from feature complete but there a few key apps it can run. For a relatively unimportant but visually impressive example, have a look at Unreal Tournament.
Cool idea, impressive work as well, considering its not a massive amount of people working on such a big project!
With Virtualisation technology maturing more and more, the boundaries between a software package and the OS it runs on may become blurred to the point where projects like this are not necessary.
Well even with virtualisation, you theoretically have to pay for Windows if you run it as a guest OS…
No I meant true Virtualization where it doesn’t matter what OS you use.
@RyanC, you sound like someone that uses Windows for ages but has never knew that a license fee is due to Microsoft for installing and using it on each single machine. This may NOT be the case, but that’s how “no need of this” sounds to me. What means “true virtualization”? Any virtual machine needs a code to run, often referred to as the “guest OS” and no matter if this OS runs within a virtual or a real machine, you have to pay for it if it is Windows (or any other proprietary, non-free OS). Having a free open source OS that can run Windows software and drivers means really **A LOT**. If that works one day and is legal, then just imagine for example the savings for a government institution with 15,000 workstations — approx. $150,000 will be saved (for a 3th world country this is much!) instead of going to the richest guy to make him even more rich.
Actually I have used Windows since the beginning of time and know all about Microsoft’s lovely licensing and contracts and yes I know all about virtual machines and so on.
The point I was trying to make was that Virtualisation technology is still maturing and I read an article on a blog about a project to do Virtualisation within the CPU itself, rather than the need for Virtual Machines that run inside a host operating system, and that was what I was referring to when I said ‘True Virtualisation’.
That aside, I don’t dispute that ReactOS is a