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This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people wo
by owenversteeg 9y ago
This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades.
Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of person whose friends install Haiku, Nix and NetBSD as their daily drivers. And the second-hand stories I've heard about people who did install React was basically "I was bored, I put it on a drive, played around for 5 minutes, and wiped it."
But that doesn't discourage them. Meanwhile, work keeps going on in the background. So many untold man-hours of thankless work going into the project, and the vast majority of that "hard" work with no payoff for years.
And now it's finally getting close to actual Windows, after decades of work, and soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows.
This is one of the most important software projects in history. My hat is off to the ReactOS developers, and congratulations on the latest release.
[edit] Here are the names of the 75 programmers that have worked on ReactOS: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS
- shakna 9y ago> Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild It's not especially common, but I do know of a couple kiosks and a PoS system that run ReactOS under the hood to avoid Windows licensing.
- dogma1138 9y agoHow the hell do they get PCI certified with ReactOS?
- tom169 9y agoTypically credit card processing is handled entirely by a physical device plugged into the computer. The computer isn't in a PCI zone.
- dogma1138 9y agoThe POS is very much in the PCI zone, the PED and card readers will be certified separately.
- ams6110 9y agoIf the POS doesn't touch card data how would it fall under PCI?
- jordache 9y agoIf the pos is system is regarded similarly as a cc accepting website that proxies cc data to an endpoint, then the os shouldn't be a variable of pci compliance
- TomMarius 9y agoMost (European) terminals don't even proxy to computer, they're completely independent devices connected to wifi that communicate directly with bank. The connection to computer is used only for "1 EUR" and "OK"/"FAIL" kind of messages and are completely optional.
- dogma1138 9y agoEven on P2PE terminals the PoS is in scope of the PCI-DSS if not the PA-DSS certification (alright I’m not sure how any PoS vendor will fly without PA) as they do (or can) pass some CHD through it even if it’s not the card numbers or the track data. CHD under the PCI standards also covers PII card holder information which does reaches the PoS for handling refunds, managing promotions, club membership etc. Even vPOS applications like those tiny card readers that hook to an iPAD as the PoS do a lot of leg work despite of them being P2PE. They check for root, they check for iOS version (security update) they check for proxy etc. That’s all part of the PA-DSS certification for the application developer. While it’s possible that a retailer who’s big enough so VISA can’t say we won’t gonna allow you to take payments with our cards, and the fines are smaller than the cost of adopting compliance to use these. I wouldn’t imagine any PoS vendor even going with that since it would essentially put them at huge risk from both the PCI standpoint and general reputation damage. As for certifying these there isn’t a single PA or PCI-DSS QSA out there that would accept ReactOS as a useable operating system because if something goes wrong the QSA is liable if they certified something they shouldn’t have.
- shakna 9y agoI don't have details, I just happened to see a crash to desktop, but it may not have been certified - many Australian retailers will pay the fines rather than go through the effort of ensuring compliance.
- dogma1138 9y agoAh the Tesco method. :)
- stephen_g 9y agoI think it would be pretty rare for Australian POS machines to handle credit card details. Almost everywhere I only see these systems using a separate terminal with its own network connection to handle the card transaction. Usually there is integration (the POS system tells the terminal the price and to prompt for a card) but I don't think the card data ever touches the POS terminal itself (unlike the way they seem to work in the US). This is a pretty good system, because the terminals are able to be updated really easily. A lot of cafes and stuff also use iPad POS software (one called 'Vend' is really popular here) and it doesn't have to be certified. This is part of the reason that it took hardly any time for almost everywhere to support contactless six or seven years ago. For example at Myer the POS systems look 15 years old but the attached card terminals are usually only a year or so old.
- dogma1138 9y agoThe iPAD solution is certified by the vendor; these employ a PCI P2PE certified terminal and a PA-DSS certified PoS software on the device. The software enforces security controls on the device as well as performs checks such as root/jailbreak detection, iOS patch level, security/passcode settings etc. and if any of these do not match what the vendor specifies (which is what they certified) it won’t work. As for the terminals on older PoS as long as the PED is certified and the PoS is certitied its not a problem.
- _o_ 9y agoRussia is using it. https://www.reactos.org/project-news/reactos-second-os-russian-governments-software-freedom-effort https://www.reactos.org/project-news/reactos-second-os-russi...
- mmansoor78 9y agoJust curious, can you share a few names?
- shakna 9y agoOnly worked with the kiosks directly, which were being deployed by Gumtree-Kiosk to medical clinics, and NEOTouch to retailers. Both very small Australian companies, probably about 100k deployments between them.
- mgummelt 9y agoWhy would one use ReactOS over Wine? I read this page: https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE, but it didn't really provide an answer. I understand that ReactOS doesn't require Linux as a dependency, but is that a significant win?
- dragontamer 9y agoWine and ReactOS are practically sister-projects at this point that share a ton of code. ReactOS does replicate the NT Kernel, so in theory (if it ever gets there), ReactOS would be able to run Windows Drivers. IE: the "real" NVidia and AMD Drivers or any other kernel-level drivers that exist in Windows land. These days, AMD (and even NVidia) have decent Linux drivers. And WiFi drivers have Windows->Linux translators as well. But full compatibility to any Windows binary (including device drivers) is certainly a noble goal. There are a lot of little hardware devices that are written for Windows only (ie: specialized medical equipment, CAM / CNC Mill programs, etc. etc.) ReactOS would allow a smooth transition to Open Source if they achieve their goals. ------------ EDIT: It should be noted that there are a ton of Windows OS-level details that Microsoft does much better than Linux too. IE: I'd argue that Microsoft's security model (SIDs + ACLs) is superior to Unix-style Users + Groups. A large group of open-source developers who strongly understand the low-level internals of Windows is certainly a good thing in any case.
- astro_robot 9y agoHow long did it take for Windows 95 to be developed? It would be an interesting contrasts between Enterprise and Charitable development.
- da_chicken 9y agoWindows 95 still borrowed a lot of code from MS-DOS, though. That's why you could still exit to the command prompt. I think you could do that through WinME.
- DEFCON28 9y agoHuh? Why would you even say this? There's no MS-DOS code in Windows 95, and you couldn't exit Windows 95 to a command prompt. Are you just trying to throw some FUD into this conversation?
- chungy 9y agoNo, he's right. Windows 95/98/Me use MS-DOS as a bootloader, and Windows 95+98 still allowed you to exit Windows from the shutdown prompt, leaving you only at the DOS prompt. Windows Me took away the ability to exit, least without a binary hack to IO.SYS that can re-enable it.
- orionblastar 9y agoYou mean DOS Mode where Win9X GUI shuts down and reboots into DOS mode to run DOS software. I was a Win95 beta tester.
- kalleboo 9y agoYou could even configure Windows 95/98 to boot directly to DOS by setting BootGUI=0 in MSDOS.SYS, and then you'd have to run "WIN" to boot Windows
- snvzz 9y agoIsn't MSDOS.SYS a binary? Are you sure you don't mean CONFIG.SYS?
- make3 9y agowhen it starts getting really good, Microsoft will probably sue it to the ground.
- _o_ 9y agoIn Russia? Yeah, right... :D
- revanx_ 9y agoHow's that? It's open source and they wrote the whole thing from scratch. Even if they abandon the project it's open source and work can continue even after MS has their way with them.
- rbanffy 9y agoMicrosoft has more budget for making coffee for the legal department than ReactOS has budget. Even if the lawsuit has no chance of prevailing, it still can force the ReactOS team to shut down. Oracle made a convincing enough case against Google about copying APIs, IIRC.
- breakingcups 9y agoYou forget about the bigger FOSS community goodwill that they've carefully been trying to cultivate in the past few years that they will throw away by doing that.
- gnode 9y agoThey've had problems in the past, based on the legitimacy of reverse engineering Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit > Even if they abandon the project it's open source and work can continue even after MS has their way with them. Such infringement claims are damaging to the legitimacy of the codebase itself. Anyone taking up the project could face the same problems.
- mieseratte 9y ago> Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild I've seen it once so far, because my employer has a no Windows policy for contractual / security reasons and I was requested to translate a foreign-language dialog (on an English language OS installation). It was to solve / use an esoteric bit of Windows, that ultimately did not succeed. I commend the effort to make such a distro, but it is still a decade or longer away from the "casual" techie.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago> soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. No they won't. It's a fringe OS that requires technical expertise to install. Not only that but it looks like "old Windows". Users won't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support. You'll see tiny pockets of people using it but as Microsoft gets closer and closer to simply having a free OS it doesn't seem likely anyone would ever use this OS for anything beyond "hey, that's cool!".
- robertAngst 9y agoTwo things >It lights a fire under M$'s asses to make windows competitive >Adoption is slow but exponential. Today is the first day I learned about ReactOS and I'm excited. I can program and I have money. If people can find value in it, adoption will grow.
- goatlover 9y agoSo it will become this is the year of ReactOS on the desktop?
- DEFCON28 9y agoWindows 10 is good (really!) if you haven't taken a look at in a while. I switched from Mac on the Desktop to Windows 10 because I needed "pro" hardware (NVIDIA GPU, 1 TB RAM, etc) and it works just fine. They've really been on the ball in the last couple of years.
- n1vz3r 9y agoI saw (back in 2012) a ReactOS deployed at points-of-sale in large retail chain in (then Ukrainian) Crimea. Maybe it was cheaper to make their specialized POS software compatible than pay for Windows licenses.
- trumped 9y ago> And now it's finally getting close to actual Windows Security probably hasn't been tested very much but it probably will be as secure as most other OSes? (i.e., not very secure)
- Zardoz84 9y agoI'm thinking seriusly installing on an old computer that haves Windows XP and a Debian 9. I have Windows XP there, because is the last Windows that supports a old Roland plotter from early of 90's. ReactOS can use Windows XP drivers ?