I admire the people behind ReactOS for their perseverance, I really wish I had just 1/10th of what they have.
Really? Are you absolutely sure, Sherlock? Did you know that the water is wet already or are you going to announce that in your next comment? ;)
The project has many other reasons-to-be and it would probably be very hard to find anyone seriously believing that "competing against Microsoft" is one of them.
As a matter of fact, I think it is a shame that so few support ReactOS. The idea is grand and think about how many resources people are willing to invest into using, say, Linux as an alternative to Windows (I love Linux, by the way): If those resources were spent on ReactOS, the project would be flying in 5-10 years or so. Then we could perhaps have a well-designed, compatible, free "Windows".
I thought the kernel aspects would be interesting, but they were really trying for driver-level compatibility with Windows NT, which means that they have to have essentially the same operating principles, etc. For some reason, I didn't want to make a line-for-line clone of Windows itself. After all, OSS people are always talking about how we would do it better.
If the goal is to be able to use the proprietary drivers supplied with some kind of hardware on a mostly OSS base, that's a decent goal. But if you want to be able to run it with complicated software that uses a lot of Windows APIs, etc., it's a fools errand.
However, I found it interesting how ReactOS could be used to teach Microsoft devs about Windows internals, even if it wasn't exactly the same. That sort of blew my mind. When you have a bunch of trade secrets, you don't really want the whole company to have access to the code, I guess, and so you benefit from having an open source clone to point to when you want to say how something like a Mutex is really implemented.
I don't believe they're competing against Microsoft.
Gaining compatibility is as much a cooperation from ReactOS'es side.
But it's a losing battle to gain compatibility with Microsoft, because it's against Microsoft's ethos.