Thorium Core Cloud Desktop
kickstarter.com
Thorium Core is a commercial distribution of ReactOS, the Open Source Windows compatible operating system, targeted for cloud computing.
kickstarter.com
There's no way that a shop looking for funding via kickstarter can match the feature development of Microsoft. If you want to disrupt Microsoft, it's sure as shit not going to come from a clone of their 11 year old OS which is 4 versions back now.
I don't see this project taking off in the foreseeable future (though I do think they will hit their funding goal)
At least it appears that the 2 people at the kickstarter project are part of the ReactOS team (http://www.reactos.org/wiki/People_of_ReactOS ) but the page at the kickstarter project appears to be written in a hurry. Wording like "Thorium core is an attempt to build" doesn't exactly garner a lot of trust in getting the work done.
I am not seeing the use case. Access to ReactOS from the cloud? Sorry, but that's very vague, they are going to copy remote desktop as well? It would help if ReactOS itself was stable already. It's a great piece of engineering. Amazing what they have done so far, but -at least during my limited testing- when playing with it in a virtual machine it never survived a stable session longer as a few hours. Bringing that to the cloud just means another layer of complexity and thus possible failure.
It is also not clear to me if the kickstarter project is actually connected to the ReactOS project and what the other contributors think about it. I would at least have expected a page at the ReactOS project about this if it was part of the rest. So far I have not seen a page on the ReactOS site about this and that would help for building trust in the kickstarter project.
People just throw in the "cloud" word anywhere, don't they?
While I agree that cloud is overused in general, it seems appropriate in this case.
I'm pretty sure that for any given definition I could give you a counterexample or two that's had the label slapped on it :)
(Unless it's "has a network connection")
I feel like a company willing to migrate to something like ReactOS could just as easily migrate over to some *nix variant. The only Windows-only thing that I can think of being essential would be Office (that might be the big one though).
But it's not Windows. It's a new OS that borrows a lot from an older version of Windows as far as design goes, and hopefully brings something new to the table.
And I don't really see how "needing it" or not matters. People use an OS they like, or an OS that has the features they enjoy, or an OS that is compatible with the software they use, or whatever.
> Especially when more and more software is being written in platform-agnostic languages like Java?
Really? Software has always been written in a variety of platform-agnostic languages. C and C++, to name a couple. But I see a recent trend of ignoring and dismissing portability beyond a select few favorite platforms.
Firstly, from their literature I am guessing they want to be grabbing on to people who want to continue using XP style services after Microsoft cuts support for XP next year, however I feel they will most definitely miss the boat with this one, 4 months is not a big migration window let-alone for development of the product.
Secondly, their core offering is support. A lot can be said about Microsoft's customer service, however I will never fault the support contracts they offer to businesses. I honestly cannot see how they intend to match that.
ReactOS is still in alpha stages and I can't see a difference between the ReactOS I first saw in 2006 and the current one, it still is extremely limited when it comes to running advanced windows applications.
Also Windows cloud computers aren't that expensive, a Windows cloud on EC2 costs only a few cents more than a Linux one plus you can also use Azure.
It seems pointless to me.
ReactOS is opensource!