ReactOS

ReactOS 0.3 running the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser

ReactOS Desktop 0.3.1: On the left Menu Start and on the right the ReactOS File Explorer

New shell of ReactOS (v0.4.0 and later)

ReactOS (React Operating Ssystem) is a free and open source operating system for PCs. x86/x64 developed to be binary compatible with software and device drivers designed for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and later versions. ReactOS has been noted as a possible open source drop-in replacement for Windows and by your information about undocumented Windows APIs.

ReactOS has been in development since 1996. As of October 2020 ReactOS is considered alpha software, which, while having incomplete features, many Windows applications already work (for example, Adobe Reader 6.0, OpenOffice, etc.)), and is therefore recommended by developers for evaluation and testing purposes only.

ReactOS is primarily written in C, with some elements, such as ReactOS Explorer's File Explorer, written in C++. The project partially implements the functionality of the Windows API and has been ported to the AMD64 processor architecture. ReactOS, as part of the FOSS ecosystem, re-uses and collaborates with many other free software projects, most notably the project Wine which develops a Windows compatibility layer for Unix-based operating systems.

History

Mission

As stated on the official website,

"The main objective of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system that is compatible at the binary level with Windows... so that people used to the familiar Windows user interface would find it simple using ReactOS. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows and install ReactOS without the end user notice the change.

Early developments

Around 1996 a group of programmers and free software developers started a project called FreeWin95 which consisted of implementing a clone of Windows 95. The project was under discussion for the design of the system, having already developed the MS-DOS compatible layer, but this was a situation that was not completed.

Although FreeWin95 had started with great expectations, by the end of 1997 no versions had yet been released to the public. As a result, members of the project, led by coordinator Jason Filby, banded together to revive the project. This revival attempted to duplicate the functionality of Windows NT. In creating the new project, a new name was chosen, ReactOS. The project began development in February 1998 with the creation of the foundation for a new NT kernel and basic drivers. The name ReactOS was coined by project founder Jeff Knox. While the term "OS" refers to "operating system" (operating system), the term React "react" refers to the group's dissatisfaction with - and reaction to - Microsoft's monopoly position.

Ekush OS Distribution

In 2004, a copyright infringement was found in the GPL code of ReactOS (and other free software code) when someone distributed a copy of ReactOS under the name Ekush OS. Later the website went offline.

Internal audit

In order to avoid copyright litigation, ReactOS has to be expressly and completely distinct from and not derived from Windows, a goal that needs very careful work. The claim was made on January 17, 2006 by former developer Hartmut Birr on the ReactOS Developers (ros-dev) mailing list, claiming that it contained ReactOS code derived from the teardown of Microsoft Windows. The code that Birr disputes involved the BadStack function in syscall.S, as well as other unspecified cases. Comparing this feature to disassembled Windows XP binaries, Birr argued that the BadStack feature was simply copy-paste from Windows XP, as they were identical. Alex Ionescu, the author of the code, stated that while the Windows XP binary in question was indeed disassembled and studied, the code is not limited to copy-pasting, but reimplemented. The reason the functions are identical, according to Ionescu, is because there was only one possible way to implement the function.

On January 27, 2006, the ReactOS team decided to temporarily suspend access to operating system files for non-developers, after a meeting to verify the claim that the project had been tainted with code copyrighted by Microsoft. However, when approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. As the ReactOS development project is free and open source software, the lawsuit provoked a negative reaction from the free software community. Notably, Wine banned some ReactOS developers from contributing to its code, citing concerns about the origin of their contributions. Wine banned some developers who were inactive as of 2016 from providing contributions and formal high-level cooperation between the two projects. remains difficult as of 2016. Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted after auditing, and low-level cooperation for bug fixes continues.

In a statement posted on its website, ReactOS cites different legal definitions of what constitutes reverse-engineered cleanroom as one of the causes of the conflict. In some countries, including the United States, they require code reimplementation disassembly is written by someone other than the person who disassembled and examined the original code, while other countries will allow both tasks to be performed by the same individual. Accordingly, ReactOS clarified its Reverse Engineered Cleanroom Intellectual Property Requirement Policy Statement in accordance with US law. In order to ensure that only reverse engineered cleanroom was used, an audit of internal code, and all developers were required to sign an agreement agreeing to abide by the project's reverse engineering policies. Development contributors were not affected by these events, and all access to software development tools was restricted. He restored shortly thereafter. In September 2007, with the audit completion due, the audit status was removed from the ReactOS website. Although the audit has been performed, the specific details were not made public, as it was only an internal effort to ensure compliance with the project's own policies.

Most of the assembly code, which was also apparently copied, has been replaced as a natural progression in ReactOS development, with developers having reimplemented the functionality in C for portability reasons.

In addition, the Windows source code leaked in 2004 was not seen as a legal risk to ReactOS, as professional secrecy was deemed indefensible in court due to the wide dispersion.

Demonstration to political figures

Aleksey Bragin, coordinator of the ReactOS project (on the left) showing the functionality of ReactOS to Viktor Alksnis (in the center).

Demos of the operating system have been given, primarily to Russian political figures. In 2007, Viktor Alksnis met with project coordinator Aleksey Bragin, who gave a presentation and demo of the project, showing Total Commander and Mozilla Firefox running on ReactOS.

The Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitri Medvédev, (left) gives a demonstration of ReactOS.

In 2011, Dmitry Medvedev also gave a demonstration as President of Russia for a secondary school in Verhnerusskoe, Stavropol during a visit, assisted by one of the development team members.

On July 31, 2012, Vladimir Putin also gave a demonstration during his visit as President of Russia to the Seliger Youth Forum, which was attended by Marat Karatov, one of the development team members.

Funding campaigns

On May 1, 2012, a funding campaign of €30,000 began to finance additional development projects. By the end of the year, approximately 50% of the funding target had been reached and it was decided to continue the funding campaign. funding without set terms. The money went to ReactOS Deutschland e. V.. As the German tax law for this form of registered voluntary association (Eingetragener Verein) makes it problematic to pay developers directly, indirect possibilities such as stipends were evaluated.

Thorium Core Cloud Desktop Project

When ReactOS was awarded Project of the Month at SourceForge in June 2013, Kickstarter announced a campaign in an interview with project coordinator Aleksey Bragin.

On December 23, 2013, the announced project was revealed as a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of $120,000 kicked off. The Thorium Core Cloud Desktop dubbed Cloud Computing service would use ReactOS as its core and could allow the use of Windows compatible applications from mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets), workstations or any another connected device. On February 21, 2014, he finished fundraising below the target amount, with only $48,965 of the $120,000 raised.

ReactOS Community Edition

In April 2014, the ReactOS project announced an Indiegogo campaign releasing ReactOS Community Edition, a version of ReactOS based on version 0.4. The flexible funding campaign had a goal of US$50,000 with additional stretch goals beyond this. Development of ReactOS Community Edition would be community-focused, with ReactOS users voting and deciding which software and hardware drivers to use. The project will investigate how to add support to it. On June 1, 2014, the flexible crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo ended with the sum of $25,141 for the development of the Community Edition, and the voting process to support hardware and software it started soon after.

ReactOS Hackfest 2015

The ReactOS project organized a Hackfest from August 7 to 12, 2015, in the German city of Aachen.

Participation in Google Summer of Code

6 times - 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.

ReactOS Hackfest 2017

The ReactOS project organized a new edition of its Hackfest from August 14 to 18, 2017, in the German city of Cologne.

Version history

Many API and ABI development tools are ready for a high level of development and a basic GUI interface is too. ReactOS also has ReactOS Explorer, a user interface similar to the familiar Windows Explorer.

Development

Basic ReactOS Development

ReactOS is primarily written in C, with some elements, such as the ReactOS Explorer and the sound stack, written in C++. The project relies on MinGW for compilation, and contributes to its development by submitting patches to its components.

The developers intend to make the kernel and user-mode APIs more compatible with Windows NT version 5.2 (Windows Server 2003) and add support for more applications and hardware with plans to target newer versions of Windows as the mature development. DirectX support is through ReactX, an internal implementation. Hardware-accelerated 2D rendering is done natively, while other drawing functionality is redirected to OpenGL as a workaround.

Development progress is influenced by the size of the development team and their level of experience. As an estimate of the effort required to implement Windows 7, Microsoft employs 1,000 or more developers, organized into 25 teams, with each team averaging 40 developers. As of the September 2, 2011, ReactOS entry on Ohloh, the page tracked through the "very large, active development team" enlace lists 33 developers who have contributed over a 12-month period and a cumulative total as of 2016 of 104 current and former users who have contributed code to the project via subversion since its inception. In his presentation at hackmeeting 2009 In Milan, ReactOS developer Michele C. pointed out that most developers learn about Windows architecture while working on ReactOS without having any prior knowledge.

Although current ReactOS targets primarily the x86/AMD64 PC platform, it has also been partially ported to ARM architectures. Support for the Xbox, a variant of the IA-32 architecture, was added through the use of a specific HAL architecture, although this, along with a port for PowerPC, are no longer actively maintained.

Collaboration and reuse

While ReactOS aims to build a Windows-compatible kernel as open source software, much of the functionality needed to build a complete OS is already available in the larger open source ecosystem. Therefore, if it is available and possible, it is based on ReactOS and collaborates with existing open source projects. Conversely, projects like Wine, Captive NTFS or Longene also reuse the open source codebase of ReactOS.

Hardware driver stack

On the hardware driver side, for example, the NTFS-3G project provides an NTFS driver and UniATA provides a Serial ATA driver for ReactOS. The project has also been experimented with using the FullFAT library on its rewrite of its FAT installable file system. ReactOS makes use of Haiku's USB stacking both as a reference and as the basis for its USB support. Mesa 3D software provides an OpenGL rendering.

Wine Collaboration

A diagram of the simplified ReactOS architecture, with the Wine dependencies indicated with the logo of this.

Both the ReactOS project and Wine share the goal of running Windows binary software natively and can therefore share many dependencies and development. ReactOS uses portions of the Wine project so that it can take advantage of your developments in the application of Win32 API. NTDLL, USER32, KERNEL32, GDI32 and Advapi components cannot be used due to their differences with the ReactOS architecture, but the other parts of the code can be shared between both projects. Components not available from Wine are developed separately.

Also, as an alternative means of improving support for USER32 and GDI32, the experimental ARWINSS branch was created, via an alternative implementation of the Win32 API. Whereas the original Win32 subsystem of ReactOS was modeled after its equivalent in Windows, ARWINSS combines the architecture of that subsystem with the corresponding application in Wine. To this end, ARWINSS uses the Wine and USER32 and GDI32 libraries with some changes to gain more advantage in Wine's compatibility with existing software. ARWINSS also allows the user to use a remote X server instead of a local screen.

Networks

The ReactOS network stack is built from the TCP portion of the OSKit port of the FreeBSD network stack, along with an internally developed implementation for packet-oriented protocols such as IP. ReactOS network, lwIP was integrated. Windows network services are already available as an open source alternative like LSASS, SAM, NETLOGON, the Samba/Samba TNG project spoolers. As a client software implementation for Microsoft's proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol, a fork of rdesktop is used.

Others

The Tango Desktop Project initiative provides open source design guidelines and resources (such as icons) for applications in desktop environments. FreeType is an open source software development library, used to render text in bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations. The KernelEx project is an extension of the Windows APIs and project compatibility layer, which provides open source implementations of some Windows APIS. Other contributing projects are MinGW, Syslinux, adns, ICU, GraphApp, Ext2, GNU FreeFont, DejaVu fonts, and Liberation fonts.

ReactOS installer, the system is multilingual with the default English of the United States

Supported architectures

ReactOS supports several architectures:

• IA-32.
• Xbox (Return).
• PowerPC. (Detained)
• ARM (Partial Start).
• AMD64 (Partial Start).

Windows NT 4.0 was ported to other IA-32 architectures such as MIPS, Alpha AXP, and PowerPC, and NT derivatives have been treated similarly, such as Windows XP ported to AMD64, and Windows Server 2003 ported to AMD64 and Itanium. In view of this, ReactOS developers have partially ported it to AMD64 and ARM architectures. Support for the Xbox, a variant of the IA-32, was added via a specific HAL architecture, although this, along with PowerPC support, is no longer actively maintained.

Reception

Several people have acknowledged ReactOS and the implications of having a viable open source replacement for Windows. A 2004 article and interview from the German weekly Der Spiegel describes ReactOS as being aimed at Windows users who want to forgo using commercial proprietary software without having to switch to Linux. Likewise, DistroWatch, a Linux distribution monitoring website, lists ReactOS and describes it as "a free and open source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT" architecture.

In his column for Free Software Magazine, David Sugar pointed out in 2006 that ReactOS could allow the use of applications based on previous versions of Windows, whose APIs have been scrapped. Likewise, he recognized its potential to broaden the total deployment base of free software, and as a resource for developers who want to learn about undocumented Windows APIs in the course of writing portable applications. In 2008, John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Magazine, noted that Windows NT's architecture has remained largely the same up to now, making it an ideal candidate for cloning, and believes that ReactOS could be "a bigger threat to the domain than Linux." of Microsoft". Responding to Dvorak's column, ZDNet technology journalist Dana Blankenhorn notes that a lack of corporate backers and partners has rendered the project innocuous to Microsoft. Echoing this, OSNews' Thom Holwerda classifies ReactOS in a family of hobbyist operating systems that are maintained only by small groups of developers working in their spare time, and that do not have the financial support that they have. The main operating systems, nor with the legacy of other older and used systems, such as RISC OS.

In October 2015, a Network World review of ReactOS v0.3.17 was impressed with "It's just like running Windows 2000" and praised the application package manager, a feature missing from the original Windows.

Awards

The ReactOS project won the "Best Presentation" from the annual Seliger Youth Forum with 100,000 Russian rubles in 2011, which was attended by Alexander Rechitskiy, one of the members of the development team.

ReactOS was a featured project on SourceForge for the week beginning February 27, 2012 through April 25, 2013 along with several others. It was also Sourceforge's Project of the Month through June 2013 and into February 2019.

In 2015, ReactOS was named by the Russian Ministry of Communications as an alternative "client/server operating system" worth supporting for its potential in reducing Russia's dependence on proprietary software imports.