ReactOS gets big cash injection

[commodorejohn]

Interesting, here's hoping they get it. I've been waiting for ReactOS to be a usable alternative for years now, I'd really like to see it come to fruition.

(Should be really interesting if the PM decides to take them up on it - seems like Europe has a more active interest in software politics than the US, and Russia's general "screw you, we do what we want" attitude would be pretty hilarious to see pitted against Microsoft if it came to that.)

[commodorejohn]

The article kind of over-sells it - ReactOS is still in alpha stage (though it looks to be awfully functional for an alpha, I think that might be a "no guarantees" on the part of the developers.)

As for compatibility...given that they're straight-up reimplementing the whole operating system, rather than trying to adapt the API to an entirely different OS, I'd think that if it ever gets to a finished state it'll actually surpass Wine. But as far as where it is now, I don't know. (Though they've got Flash working, and I gather that that's one of the less well-coded pieces of commercially-supported software out there.)

[commodorejohn]

Not really, the whole point is to reimplement the API to spec anyway. DirectX isn't voodoo, it's just a wrapper layer to provide access to common functionality on multimedia hardware, and the way it's supposed to work is already documented, because otherwise nobody could write programs for it. As long as ReactOS's version takes the same inputs and gives the same output, software isn't going to know the difference.