Amoral tech strikes again.

Good luck with that; Russia isn't interested in software freedom, they're just not interested in something from outside Russia they can't control.

EDIT: A friend informs me that the head of the project is himself Russian, and already works largely under government funding. So in retrospect, less "amoral tech nerds take money from wherever they can get it" and more "some Russian bureaucrats want their own Red Star OS".

That's an odd statement to make, since freedom is indistinguishable from having control.

ReactOS is free and open source and is released under the GPL license.

> Russia isn't interested in software freedom, they're just not interested in something from outside Russia they can't control

Which is exactly what the first paragraph states: "are pursuing measures to rid vendor lock-in of strategically important software"

Why should Russia (or any organization, from 1 person up to nations) prefer vendor lock-in over something that they can control?

The distinction is whether it's a question of freeing it for everyone's control, or merely trading foreign control for their own.

Russia doesn't want GNU, they just want a Russian Microsoft that's in Putin's pocket like everything else.

Take a look at what's happened to VKontakte some time.

VKontakte can't be easily forked, while ReactOS is GPL.

Of course the Russian government wants to be able to control their systems, and any positive effects for others are at best some nice PR.

How does that detract any value from ReactOS (or Linux, which is their "other" desktop and server OS)?

One of the principles of Open Source (compared to Free Software) is the idea that people and organizations work in a project where every contributor works in their self-interest. Why is this suddenly a bad thing?

Isn't software freedom about someone from outside not controlling your stuff?

Let's hope it'll transcend out of its current amoral tech state! It has the potential to become the building block of choice for many use-cases where other solutions are too expensive (in terms of required efforts).

"Russian government" and "freedom effort" in the same sentence. Screenshot, print, frame, hang on wall.

I know you're just making a joke, but obviously Russia is not free from vendor lock-in any more than any country.

Even ignoring the context, Russia is more free than US in anarchical sense, as you can do more things without repercussions there than in US. US jails population vastly outnumbers Russias, and you don't need a fishing license in Russia :)

>Russia is more free than US in anarchical sense, as you can do more things without repercussions there than in US.

That is very questionable. Try being gay in Russia and then tell me how free you are. It wont be the government oppressing you usually (oh they will - see Pussy Riot) it'll be your neighbors, employers, cops, etc. There are other "oppressors" than rule of law, there's also mob mentalities.

Russia is also very low on any human/political freedom index. Yeah, and bragging about shitty wildlife conservationism isn't impressive either. Reminds me of the Chinese who are patriotic, then don a mask to not breath in the filthy polluted air they live with.

How much time have you spent in Russia? I have a feeling all your "knowledge" is from the western media, means you have been totally mislead in this life.

It's not all that hard to find such examples for any country in the world. Try being black in South Carolina.

[to add: I have no interest in defending Russia, and no skin in the game. However the cheap shots annoy me]

You can nitpick all you want. Russia is ranked 57 on the Human Development Index, while the US is 4 and the top 10 dominated by western countries whose values Russians hate. Theres no comparison here and its disingenuous to play up a horrible autocracy like Russia as some wonderful place, although, its sadly, upvote heaven on HN.

When I was 11 I lived in Russia. In a small town. My parents had a gay friend - whom they explained to me was different in his personal life. There was (and still is) a well known restaraunt in that town where gay community gathered. I went there few times with my parents. No one bothered the community. - they are still there. What Russians do not like, and I agree with it, is the open and flamboyant proclamation of one's sexual preferences. Keep it to your own bedroom or gather with likeminded people in a "dedicated" place and no one will mind you in Russia.

Hang it near the screenshot of Edward Snowden getting political asylum in Russia.

Snowden's status in Russia is more that of a pet, or a trophy -- up for trade at any moment, for a high enough price -- than that of a political refugee.

And he knows it, which is why he's trying to GTHO of there (even at the price of a reasonably short prison sentence in the U.S.).

I was joking (could I say deadpanning?), the serious part being that Snowden showed a need for freedom from US-made software (regardless of citizens' freedoms), and that the rest of the world tries hard to look so bad that it makes Russia look better than it deserves.

I wonder what Russia would have done to him, had he been a Russian citizen leaking / revealing vast amounts of their classified information. Pretty obvious what would have happened, and it's also obvious why Russia gave him asylum.

There's a reason Snowden would leave Russia at the earliest possibility.

They would have done the same as the US.

Plus or minus some polonium. Assassinations aren't uncommon in Russia among the opposition.

I'm skeptical Russia would allow someone like William Binney to walk around saying the things he has been for years. Or that Russia wouldn't essentially rig a sentence up for someone like Daniel Ellsberg, given Russia's extraordinarily corrupt justice system.

I'm no conspiracy theorist but if Snowden hadn't have gone public so quickly I believe he would be dead or disappeared. It's easy to look at the horrible things countries like Russia have done/do but let's not forget things like illegal rendition and torture that the US has done with the backing of other major countries.

Believe it or not, Russia today is very free country with very good life for an average Joe, comparing to the UK. And ReactOS story is just another proof of that.

Erm... your definition of "free" and "good" ought to be fairly unusual to believe that statement. I think the likelihood of a UK journalist to be murdered by the UK government is 10000x smaller than the analogous probability in Russia. As to "very good life" - while quality is subjective, the quantity of life the average Joe is expected to have (aka life expectancy) is certainly less than it is in the UK.

And to reply to a sister comment - you don't have to be gay to run into various trouble you wouldn't expect to run into in the West, though being one will likely make matters worse.

You'r belief on the likelihood probability is not factual, it's based on claims of a side in geopolitical confrontation, the one you choose to believe, because that's where you live.

It is certainly true that standard of living is lower in Russia, but is better than many other countries you consider "free".

Even though it's beside the point, I personally was born in Russia. A lot of Russian journalists opposing the government were murdered, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya

When you demand "facts", do you demand definite proof that the government did it (a bloody hard thing to obtain in the case of a murdering government), or are you claiming that the UK murders a similar amount of journalists?

As to "countries that I consider free" - I don't know where you get insight into my thinking; I was talking specifically about the UK which the grandparent brought up.

I have to admit that I'm sick and tired of relativism brought to a point where black and white are supposed to be indistinguishable. Seriously, who'd you rather fuck with, the Putin government or the current UK government? I think we all know the answer. Why are people wishing to sound "objective" so eager to ignore the obvious?

He probably meat that "unclear murders" do happen in UK and elsewhere too. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_%28weapons_expert%...

Unfortunately, things are looking very grim for average Joe in Russia. The oil party, and the easy gains that came with it, are over.

"The number of middle-class Russians could halve to 20 percent, taking it back to the same level as after the 1998 default and devaluation, says Evgeny Gontmakher, chief economist at the Institute of Contemporary Development, whose board of trustees is headed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/putin-s-mi...

As long as you don't step out of line:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26265230

Which is why you're seeing all of the young, educated, upwardly mobile UK residents itching to move to Moscow. </sarcasm>

To be fair, he said "the average Joe", not "the young, educated, upwardly mobile."

As long as you're not gay.

The same way you're not free being game in a religiously conservative population that did not undergo sexual revolution of the 60s. Gay people are not hunted and jailed like someone might want you believe. In regards to gay freedoms, Russia is where US was in the 80s, things are changing.

Серьезно? Нет. Владимир Владимирович хочет, чтобы вы поверили в это. Не верю.

Support for the project by Russian Federation state is an important impellent to release a working package of that open source OS which is with no tight license. (If we would speak about a tight license - it makes (would make) useless crap from a project.) And about the criticism to state support : if there will be no ROS, people will have either to use Windows itself, or Linux+Wine. Would that limitation be better ? And that is not the first place - that is the second place for support to a client/server OS project (the first place was given to some Linux project http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=42406 ).

Instead of stopping occupation of 3 neighbour nation territories and supporting war machine, they are "freeing" the software.

Of cause it is a window of opportunity for the software integrators. But it is bloody money they are getting.

(Did not want to be political, but it is a political news article)

This is just another money laundering scheme for Russian Officials. It's the same thing as GLONAS or Russian iPhone alternative. It will take long time, ton of resources and will not work.

ReactOS has been in alpha for 17 years! Don't see how this is a money laundering scheme. Heck they just did a indiegogo campaign.

Now when Минсвязи (Ministry of Communications) of Russia is interested it is a scheme.

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.

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.

I have a feeling that a clone of windows 2000 is going to have some hilari-bad security bugs...

Actually, at the current moment ReactOS is clone of Windows 2003, not the 2000. That is the big difference!

I know this position isn't popular, but I don't think that will help. They are reverse engineering a really complicated system.

Do you think that they have the same kinds of controls that it took MS literally a decade and millions of to dollars develop?...Controls that that were expensive in time and money that then only improved their development to the extent that it has? (far, far from perfect.)

Maybe...and this is a big maybe...there is a enough of a difference between react and windows that normal windows bugs won't be surfaced. I'm curios as to whether they support NX, ASLR, or 64 bit? Even if they don't copy the system bug for bug they may be trivially exploitable just because they don't have the resources to harden it.

ReactOS is free and open source and is released under the GPL license so anyone can see the source code.

Open source only makes bugs shallow if lots of people are using the software and reviewing the code. OpenSSL is a great example of code that lots of people ended up using but not reviewing that had/has many issues.

I'm not saying anything negative about open source...I'm just saying that its more complex than just having code available.

yeah, i mentally multiply "Rewriting a project" times "reverse engineering is hard" and see a lot of exploitable material probably lurking somewhere in there...

ReactOS isn't reverse engineered or rewritten from Windows 2000. It was a cleanroom re-engineering of compatible Windows APIs. And a lot of their work got back-ported (and visa-versa) into Wine.

ReactOS may very well have bugs, security issues, and similar. But those have nothing to do with the fact that it is designed to be compatible with Windows APIs.

There isn't a lot of difference between "rewriting this in another language" and "cleanroom rewrite" as far as getting burned by the same corner cases in the same languages go.

I get what you're saying, though.

Aren't they implementing it one .dll at a time, though? Meaning, they still need a lot of the original MS binaries to work?

Not just DLL after DLL. MS DLLs of course are not included in ISO releases. Nor they could come under license of the releases. They though might work, but they not necessarily are tested nor they are planned to be used.