Preservation. Think a library or museum archiving a piece of human culture. Not just the OS itself but the programs that run on the OS. If ReactOS succeeds you'

Preservation. Think a library or museum archiving a piece of human culture. Not just the OS itself but the programs that run on the OS. If ReactOS succeeds you'd be able to run those Win95/98/XP era programs literally forever (think 100 years from now) as long as ReactOS is kept up to date and compiled on new processor architectures. Sure you can target running the real original OS as well but this requires a virtual machine and doesn't always work right, since drivers have to be written for the legacy OS to support the VM virtual hardware in some cases.