Wine of course tries to offer a Microsoft Windows SDK on top of a Posix platform (such as GNU/Linux, xBSD, and I think it is being ported to MacOS/X). But, more importantly, for those who do wish to write portable applications, or those that do write free software for Microsoft Windows users, ReactOS will eventually give them an entirely free software solution to write and test their applications with, rather than having to depend on developing and testing under proprietary software. We can think of ReactOS, then, as the “Microsoft Windows documentation project”. This is well illustrated in the difficulty Wine has with running applications, even those that were created purely within “standard” Microsoft development tools and not using odd behaviors or undocumented functions on their own. Microsoft offers no such thing today-besides the lack of proper interface documentation, many of their own development tools depend on and offer libraries which use undocumented or secret API calls that are then built into applications. For those who wish to write such software, or to create portable applications that they may wish to later migrate to other platforms, it is essential to be able to target a clean and generic reference implementation of the Microsoft framework, freed from secret and undocumented behaviors. Here is why I think this project is important:įirst, we do have lots of free software today that is either written for, or has been ported to, Microsoft Windows. This is an effort to create a complete, clean room re-implementation of the entire Microsoft Windows NT operating system. Among the many free software projects out there, I think ReactOS is particularly worth some discussion.
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