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ReactOS can finally build itself
- azinman2 8y ago20 years and on version 0.4.8. No version number creep here :)
- blablabla123 8y agoYup I wonder if they use any crazy processes to realize that ;)
- ChrisSD 8y agoIt did help that they've had very sporadic development until quite recently. For the longest time it was practically dead aside from a few developers.
- parvenu74 8y agoSo when a GPL2-licensed project takes code from a BSD-licensed project and makes a derivative work based on that, shouldn't those developers submit a copy of the derivative work back to the BSD-licensed project as well, just to be fair?
- jhall1468 8y agoThere's no obligation to submit the work, if someone wants to patch in their implementation they can, but BSD doesn't obligate you to.
- smallnamespace 8y agoTo be clear, the obligation on source code availability falls upon the person using (creative a derivative work out of) other GPL'd code.
- pseudalopex 8y agoWhy would it be fair to create a proprietary fork but not a copyleft fork?
- detaro 8y agoIt's certainly appreciated if you submit back code from your proprietary fork too.
- pseudalopex 8y agoContributions are appreciated, but no one would expect you to donate the whole work "just to be fair".
- shp0ngle 8y agoI never understood this sentiment. If you care about people giving changed code back to you, you use GPL. That's what it's for. If you use BSD, you specifically say "I don't care what you do with the code". If you want forks to give code back, use GPL.
- finnthehuman 8y agoYes, but if you've chosen GPL, it suggests you care that open source project's ability to get changes back. And code can only cross the barrier between BSD and GPL in one direction. Wouldn't it therefore be polite and align with a position on developers getting changes back to make the changes available to upstream even though you're not legally obligated to? I think it makes sense to do that upstreamable work upstream. Unless the interest in GPL-style is less about getting changes back and more about keeping your work out of any closed source products.
- djsumdog 8y agoIt depends on your reasoning around the GPL and using it. It gets into the whole "permissive" vs "restrictive" debate and how people in both camps flip those terms around. I can see how, if I were a big GPL/FSF/Stallman person, I'd like to ensure everything I derive will always have future derivations be open source, even if they came from BSD roots. In that philosophy, you're almost "upgrading" the license, where the BSD/MIT/Apache folks might view it as a "downgrade".
- LukeShu 8y agoAs a GPL/FSF/Stallman person: That's exactly it. That said, I'll still usually try to contribute it back upstream under the original license; especially if I expect to be continuing to pull code from them. I think it's worth it to maintain good-will with the upstream devs, and to reduce my burden of maintaining the patches/merging new changes.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoBSD doesn't view downstream GPL as a downgrade. BSD philosophy is that they don't care about how consumers use the software. If BSD philosophy cared about downstream licensing, they would be GPL philosophy!
- eklitzke 8y agoThat is simply not practical for anything except toy projects due to the complexity it adds, and is rarely necessary anyway. The most common case is a GPL project importing BSD licensed code with minimal adaptions, e.g. just enough to integrate the code. The authors of BSD-licensed code are clearly comfortable with people adapting the code for proprietary purposes without submitting their changes, so there shouldn't really be a problem with copyleft projects doing the same. And if the authors feel otherwise, they should use a copyleft license themselves (perhaps the LGPL in a situation like this).
- badsectoracula 8y agoI don't see why, GPL doesn't require you to submit your modified GPL code back to the project, it only requires you to make the code available to others. All GPL cares about is keeping the code available and if a GPL project uses some code from a BSD-licensed project, it also makes that BSD-licensed code available as part of the GPL project (of course the entire project is now GPL, but in theory if you can rip out the BSD code without any GPL bits or modifications, you can use it under the BSD license).
- parvenu74 8y agoWould someone please tell me what is so offensive about this question?
- DoreenMichele 8y agoIt doesn't appear flagged, just downvoted. Some people use downvotes to express disagreement. Without it being flagged to death, I would not assume it is offensive. I would only assume some people don't agree.
- parvenu74 8y agoI asked a question. Where is the subject matter for "disagreeing with sentiment"? It's not like I asked an RTFM question; I'm curious if, like in the case of the story in question, when code is taken from a BSD-licensed project, if derivative work is made from it if the coders also contribute those changes back to the BSD-licensed project since there is no legal way for them to get the derivatives otherwise.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoWhere is the subject matter for "disagreeing with sentiment"? shouldn't those developers submit a copy of the derivative work back to the BSD-licensed project as well, just to be fair? Downvote could = "no, I don't agree"
- throwaway2048 8y agoIts the product of a thousand flamewars, nobody is interested in seeing a big fight about it for the 999th time.
- chucksmash 8y agoFirst thought when I saw "React" and "OS" together was "surely that can't be what it sounds like it might be." For others for whom this is new, from wikipedia[0]: ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system for x86/x64 personal computers intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003. Development began in 1996, as a Windows 95 clone project, and was continued as ReactOS in 1998, with the incremental addition of features of later Windows versions. ReactOS has been noted as a potential open-source drop-in replacement for Windows and for its information on undocumented Windows APIs. As formerly stated on the official website: > The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is > binary compatible with Windows such that people accustomed to the familiar user > interface of Windows would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of > ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows and install ReactOS without the end user > noticing the change. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS
- acobster 8y agoNews to me. Thanks for clarifying. To quote Hunter S Thompson, "there is no way to describe the terror I felt." ;)
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago> News to me. Suddenly I felt quite old.
- O_H_E 8y agoI thought about putting a disclaimer, but I was like nah, they will figure it out :)
- chris_wot 8y agoEvery time someone puts a link to ReactOS this is always commented on, and then they get a shock when they realise that ReactOS is decades older than the Javascript React. :-)
- 8y ago
- DC-3 8y agoIs anyone here using ReactOS? If so, for what purpose and how well has it served you?
- welly 8y agoGood question. I understand the motivation behind it and am impressed with the work done but can't imagine it being used as someone's primary os.
- djsumdog 8y agoI feel like I should launch it in a VM and start using it for some of my Windows tasks just to see if I can. I wonder if it can run WebEx..
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoI would assume you can run WebEx because ReactOS says they have 100% binary compatibility with Windows. What you’d need to run any Windows program is a way to parse the PE executable format, load it into memory, and emulate or simulate W32 api calls. I’m sure there are other steps but I can’t think of many more off the top of my head.
- chris_wot 8y agoWell, for that you just use WINE. ReactOS goes a lot further.
- krylon 8y agoAt home, I would not consider it because it is a Windows clone, and I have certain, strongly-held views on Windows. ;-) At work, the problem is different - even if ReactOS achieved 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with Windows 10, using it on client PCs would be too painful, because every time some application misbehaved, there would be that lingering doubt if the problem is with the application itself or with the OS. And if you called some software vendor's support hotline, the moment you let it slip that you are running something that is not Windows, they would start laughing and hang up on you. There are scenarios where I would consider a Windows 10-compatible ReactOS at work - e.g. for reviving a PC where the "native" Windows version has gone out of support, and it only needs to run MS Office or Windows' RDP client, or a browser. But in the five years I have worked as Windows admin, this has happened so rarely I doubt it would matter a lot. If the project got to the point where ISV's support hotlines did not care whether you are running MS Windows or ReactOS, ... that would change things in a big way.
- blablabla123 8y agoI respect people that build large C++ software on Windows with "native" free tools. The last time for me was around 8 years ago on Vista and I had no fun - except for the sick pleasure of working on challenges. I was porting a Linux server software to Windows using free software. Going another 10 years back, I think it took me a year to compile my C++ Hello World on Windows... :D (At some point I happily found the freeware compiler from Borland.)
- merinowool 8y agoMy greatest achievement was building ASIO (audio) driver client working with g++. At the time it was only possible with VC++.
- zerr 8y agoWell, nowadays Visual Studio community edition is that native free tool.
- zingmars 8y agoYou don't actually need to install the bloated mess that is Visual Studio for Microsoft's C++ compiler. You can download the Build Tools separately. You can also use Cygwin/Mingw compilers (gcc, clang) as well. Plenty of alternatives these days.
- chris_wot 8y agoHmmmm... if I could get Visual Studio 2015 on this then and Cygwin, it's quite likely I could build Libreoffice on it... A hell of a lot less memory and CPU intensive than Windows 10 itself...
- Seksbaht 8y agoIs this a good thing?
- O_H_E 8y agoSure, this is called bootstrapping. It's a pretty significant milestone for operating system/programming language/or any project that serve as a platform. Bootstrapping here means that a programmer can fetch the ReactOS source code, compile it, and run/deploy it without relying on any 3rd party operating system. In language that usually means that the compiler can compile an improved version of itself https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
- fjsolwmv 8y agoNot true that it doesn't rely on a 3rd party operaring system; it just doesn't directly depend on a third party operating system. Everything comes from somewhere, and this is a fundamental limit on computer security. http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
- krageon 8y agoIt relies directly on itself. The dependency is recursive, and I'll grant that it needs an origin somewhere - but the same can be said for linux built on linux (and yet we do not).
- acct1771 8y agoGood Thing™, or just a good thing?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoDoes it work with .NET Framework 4.6.2 yet? I saw suggests you could download and install 4.5 from Microsoft and run it on ReactOS, but I think later versions tend to be more closesly built into the OS itself. The software running in my car is still very much Windows dependent, but it'd be pretty interesting if I could run it on ReactOS instead.
- jake_the_third 8y agoGenuinely great to hear! Congrats to every single person involved for reaching this milestone. I expect a lot more quality of life improvements to trickle down as more people opt into using it exclusively. A side question: Can ReactOS build and run QT5? It would make building multi-build system / multi-programming language projects much much easier.
- scottbell-moron 8y agoI'm moron but nice article.
- MH15 8y agoI'd like to bring up a point about ReactOS that I never see. Why does this exist? Obviously the teams behind this are incredibly talented, but will it ever be worth it to use a blatant copy of Windows that just doesn't work as well? These developers could have spent the last 20 years working on something that actually moves the free software movement forward, instead of wasting time on a pipe dream with no practical motives. While I understand that some would like to run Windows software without being attached to Microsoft, Linux exists. Linux is free and superior to Windows in many ways. For the few legacy programs that need to be run on Windows- JUST RUN IT ON WINDOWS. Then use the 20 years you just got backto develop something that protects user's data or helps developing countries or actually pushes the boundaries of the field instead of redoing an archaic platform on which no growth can occur. Again, I'm not dissing the effort that any of these devs put into the project- it's extremely impressive. There simply exists no reason for this project to have procured the funding and man-hours that is has.
- throwaway2048 8y agoPeople are allowed to work on what they want, nobody cares that you think it is useless.
- shawnz 8y agoIt is highly useful to be able to see the source code of the platform you are developing against, for research/reference purposes. Obviously that's not possible for Windows developers, but ReactOS at least provides an example of how a compatible implementation might do things.
- viraptor 8y ago> For the few legacy programs that need to be run on Windows- JUST RUN IT ON WINDOWS. This works as long as you can get the version your application is compatible with and have hardware that version of windows can run on. At some point one of these will not be possible anymore and your choice will be either Wine or ReactOS.
- navjack27 8y agoOld windows isos & virtual machine
- T3RMINATED 8y agowe must kill this horrible project - it is wasted effort.