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Comment by dschiptsov | Hacker News Reader

Someone should explain to them that open source software without being actively developed by a global community of high skilled enthusiasts (doing it for their own use) is doomed to lag, stagnate and die. Even a Linux distribution will lag and stagnate without active community. So many did. It just a law of big numbers. Even Solaris forks are effectively dead - who would write all the drivers for all these new chipsets?

Long time ago Russian military had a brilliant idea to maintain their own Linux - it was an epic failure. And always will be.

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The solaris forks are definitly not dead. What became of opensolaris is now known as illumos and there are quite a few specialized illumos distributions around like SmartOS, OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Nexenta Stor and a few more.

I agree that you need a community of users and developers for a successful open-source project. Luckily in addition to the companies like Joyent, OmniTI, Nexenta, Lucera, Delphix (who all actually do a lot of drivers development) there is a friendly and growing community of volunteers that contribute.

What is sadly sometimes lacking a bit is marketing. After oracle went closed again many assumed opensolaris died, but in fact a lot of interesting systems development is happening in illumos land. Of course all open source. I wish a few more people would recognize what a great system and community SmartOS and OmniOS have.

Then they don't have to worry, I guess. The project is 17 years old and development speed increased in the last couple of years, since the basic building blocks in the kernel got into shape.

By the way, why are you so strongly opposed to people doing stuff?

Only to incompetent but over-confident bureaucrats.

BTW, I am the guy who migrated Lenta's (retail chain) servers from SCO Open Server to Linux back in 2000 without losing a single day of sales.

So you're just ranting against your very own nemesis, whether it has anything to do with the original article or not.

Good to know.

Surely you know better ..

There are many open source projects who are basically one-man shows (SQLAlchemy springs to mind -- it recently reached 1.0 after 9 years of intensive hacking) which survive just fine. I agree that having an active community helps, but being the main author of an open source project myself, I feel that the real reason a project survives is because its authors' lives depend on it :)

ReactOS has a plenty of drivers and programs, because the idea of ReactOS is to be 100% compatible with windows 2003+

the driver model has changed pretty significantly in the last 12 years. I think its an interesting project, but other than basic desktop compatibility this just isn't going to be really viable. Basic means...no directx...which means pretty much none of the text and 2d advances from Win7/2K8R2...

There are a lot of no-DirectX operating systems out there which do just fine. Although there is a long history of releasing Windows with DirectX, those versions of DirectX were pretty limited and installing the newer (more powerful) versions used to be only optional, on a per-need basis, before Windows got bloated. Considering that the ReactOS Foundation does not take decisions in the same way as corporations do, it's possible for DirectX to become again just some install-able frame-work (or frame-game if you will). So, DirectX may not be so badly needed as you imply it to be.

EDIT: Somewhat related - regarding OpenGL, ReactOS' decision was to bundle only the version 1.4, because installing the graphic card's drivers will give you exactly the last version of OpenGL your card can handle, that is - if you'd be interested in accessing the card's capacity (beyond what the default bundled ReactOS driver will give you) in the first place. Many folks might not even be interested in such a thing, considering that not every one plays hardcore games, so why bother? Why bloating the entire system with something that can be left as optional?

That's a very optimistic outlook. I hope it works out exactly as you hope.

There no such decision had place, one which would be against implementation of DirectX. From the other side, DX could be just taken and installed.

Any 10gb Ethernets? SAS controllers? Latest server chipsets? Support of NUMA architectures?

If they are binary-compatible with Windows, I guess they can just use the existing ones.

Is that legal? Are Windows drivers distributed in such a way that they can be used with non-Windows operating systems?

Who cares?

I know this is a loaded question but I mean it seriously. The importance of legal aspects is highly varying, from matter-deciding to completely irrelevant. Especially if you have a government of a souvereign country like russia behind you, legal problems about redistribution or usage shouldn't be a big problem.

Microsoft doesn't really own the drivers. Microsoft just provides its DDK, then the hardware vendors who wish to include their drivers along with Windows are forced to provide the sources for the drivers in cause to Microsoft. Otherwise the drivers are usually made and provided directly, independently from Microsoft, by the hardware vendors themselves. Its safe to assume that the condition for using these drivers is something that has to make the hardware vendors happy (which is whatever sells their hardware).

Aren't the drivers for SAS controllers and other server hardware usually written by 3rd parties?

It's possible, I think, that there's some Windows driver SDK code used by most drivers that has conditions on it.

I presume it can load NT closed-source drivers for the first three.

I dont have any of these on any of my home or work PCs or laptops

Yes. I think their attitude is one of NUMA NUMA YAY!

If that's from the O-Zone song, it translates (from Romanian) "you only don't take me" - was it a pun?

Well, ReactOS happens to be developed by a global community just like you've mentioned as prerequisite. It didn't died so far and the news is that there is a high chance for it to receive even more life in its veins! We'll only have to see how it will go from now on.

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