30 years of ReactOS
72 points by FedericoSchonborn
72 points by FedericoSchonborn
I've been fascinated with ReactOS for a long while. This is pretty cool, but nowhere near usable for what I typically do with a operating system :(
Curious to hear what you think you'd want to do with ReactOS or even have done?
Until AI coding gets much better, I don't see ReactOS moving beyond the hobbyist OS development space. It's always going to be faster and cheaper to improve WINE+Linux for a given use case.
But if you are interested in exploring the NT kernel design, it's a great project to get involved with!
I don't know if AI coding will ever be allowed to contribute to the project, given their extremely strict rules on asserting that you have not seen any windows source code. There is no guarantee this can be said of the training data of the AI tool.
Looks like they accept PRs "made by" Copilot and have Copilot reviews enabled.
given their extremely strict rules on asserting that you have not seen any windows source code. There is no guarantee this can be said of the training data of the AI tool.
Considering how much leaked Windows code is out there, and most of it is around the version of Windows being targetted by ReactOS... yikes.
If Microsoft was to sue for this, they'd have to publicly admit that their own tool is violating copyright. I'll be watching this with popcorn in hand.
You could implement an LLM powered clean room process: give one LLM access to the source code and have it create specifications and then have another LLM without direct access (but which is trained on it as MS is hosting multiple copies of the leak on Github) generate an implementation against those specs.
This is just a thought experiment, as the current crop of LLMs would produce bad slop given the size and complexity of the Windows codebase. But it may eventually make life difficult for MS' legal department.
ha!
ReactOS developers use Copilot to extract and copyright launder Windows source code, and then rather than fight it, Microsoft starts shipping ReactOS.
It's always going to be faster and cheaper to improve WINE+Linux for a given use case.
Unless that use case involves binary-only Windows kernel extensions, such as game anti-cheat things, device drivers for weird things, and so on. Even then, it's not clear that ReactOS will actually work for many of these use cases.