ReactOS signs its first development contract | Hacker News Reader

ReactOS signs its first development contract

reactos.org

ReactOS is one of the slowest moving open-source projects I've ever seen. It's amazing to me that it is still going.

It's interesting to look at the release dates of the different versions: 0.0.10 came out in 1998, 0.1.0 in 2003, 0.2.0 in 2004, and 0.3.0 in 2006.

So, it's been 6 years since the 0.3.0 release and we're now on 0.3.14.

Does anyone know how many people are still actively involved?

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Roadmap

Are you sure that measuring progress in version numbers is a good idea?

Maybe not, but the project is still considered 'alpha' after 14+ years, and generally not recommended for use unless you're curious or involved in development, or as they put it: "not recommended for everyday use".

Looking at the major releases was just a quick (albeit crude) way to try to understand how it's progressed.

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.3.14#Core_Developers

I think the versioning scheme is just not what you're accustomed to - not only are plenty of people actively involved, but releases happen every few months and major changes are present in every release. That's far from stagnated or even "slowest-moving," in my book.

With the recent talk of Gabe and Valve being disheartened by Windows 8 and looking to move to a new platform, I found myself wondering why they don't just buy ReactOS and hire the developers to work on it full time. That way the games wouldn't need to be ported to a new system, possibly just altered slightly.

It certainly would draw attention to the OS and provide a good legal challenge to the team when Microsoft decides enough is enough.

Probably because it's really hard/time and resource consuming/tricky to do what ReactOS is doing. By allowing Steam to Linux, they open a new and easy market for developers distributing games through Steam, where developing ReactOS would only allow their Windows users to move to an Open-Source OS.

Porting to Linux makes business sense, investing in ReactOS not so much (at least for Valve).

Why would they do that? Steam's goal isn't to make you install a whole new OS and target it for game development, it's to let you game as easily as possible.

Not to mention Valve can't alter any games themselves, the developers would have to do it.

I guess because Linux is a better OS than ReactOS and already have an established user base as well as being proven in other markets.

If they want to make porting games easier they should focus on providing abstractions for the differences between distributions and provide some DirectX -> OpenGL compatibility layer (help the Wine Project).

You know what? I wonder the same and also why the ReactOS team doesn't pitch Windows-related enterprises for investments.

I would guess because they are already happy using Windows, if you want to move away from Windows you would be better moving to Mac/Linux/BSD rather than a half baked clone of Windows.

This may be an even harder thing to achieve, but how about making Steam a virtual environment that runs on bare metal or under windows/mac/linux? That way all games are written to run as a virtual environment in the same virtual host.

Because games are performance sensitive. The tools to create cross platform games exist but the issue is that many companies have sunk a lot into DirectX based tooling & experience and DirectX only works (properly) on MS systems.

Does ReactOS have OpenGL/D3D hw acceleration of some form?

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/OpenGL

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