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These things start off very slowly, and then tend to somewhat exponentially grow and improve over time. Have a look at LibreOffice. StarOffice was open sourced

These things start off very slowly, and then tend to somewhat exponentially grow and improve over time. Have a look at LibreOffice. StarOffice was open sourced in 2000 by Sun as OpenOffice.org and started somewhat slowly. By 2004 OpenOffice.org was making steady progress, and had captured quite a bit of market share. Then the OpenOffice developers and Sun started stymying contributions, and eventually Michael Meeks setup Go-OO with a bunch of patches that made the program easier to use. Then Oracle bought Sun and really pissed off key external contributors so they forked the product and in 2011 The Document Foundation was formed to oversee LibreOffice development. Since then OpenOffice.org has stagnated and withered on the vine, whereas LibreOffice has had entire swathes of old and cruddy code rewritten and each point release has not only got huge numbers of bugs fixed, but often new features - and often entire subsystems have been rewritten without the end user ever knowing. So give it time - it's been just over 16 years since it the StarOffice source was opened to anyone. ReactOS has been around at least this long, and due to the nature of the project isn't quite as fast, but each time I read a new release it occurs to me that development is accelerating rather rapidly!

laumars 10y ago
The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow. This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft. However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative. As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not. Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.
- frik 10y ago
  Windows subsystem stagnated since 2006. Win32 is on a standstill. All new efforts (Silverlight, UniversalRuntime, etc) are not very successful (and based on Win32 subsystem as well) and like a niche compared to the vast amount of WinAPI based applications. So Windows like Office are not a moving target like they used to be. ReactOS aims for WinNT series compatibility including hardware drivers. And those driver APIs haven't changed for a decade or more.
  - laumars 10y ago
    From an end user perspective Windows 10 might not appear any more advanced than it's predecessors, but the NT subsystem has still changed quite considerably since 2006 (that date range covers Vista, Windows 7, 8.* and 10). There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc. As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.
    - userulluipeste 10y ago
      "Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies" And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.

laumars 10y ago

The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow. This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft. However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative. As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not. Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.

frik 10y ago
Windows subsystem stagnated since 2006. Win32 is on a standstill. All new efforts (Silverlight, UniversalRuntime, etc) are not very successful (and based on Win32 subsystem as well) and like a niche compared to the vast amount of WinAPI based applications. So Windows like Office are not a moving target like they used to be. ReactOS aims for WinNT series compatibility including hardware drivers. And those driver APIs haven't changed for a decade or more.
- laumars 10y ago
  From an end user perspective Windows 10 might not appear any more advanced than it's predecessors, but the NT subsystem has still changed quite considerably since 2006 (that date range covers Vista, Windows 7, 8.* and 10). There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc. As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.
  - userulluipeste 10y ago
    "Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies" And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.