On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Alex Ionescu ionucu@videotron.ca wrote:
Wake the fuck up, this isn't Codeweavers (not saying this in a bad way) and you know very well that Wine wouldn't be where it is today without CW and Google.
CW and Google (read: $$$$$$) is what made Wine what it is today.
Read my reply to Marc -- I'm surprised you +1'ed this.
And you prove the point. Wine does not try to be everything to everyone.
I think the right route to go is to let ReactOS focus on the developer side and let commercial entities do the work of making it popular for the masses as, they should have the resources to do so. Wine has always been targeted for developers and not really focused directly on user needs, sure the community helps users where possible but the project itself always left that up to entities like CodeWeavers and Google. ReactOS community resources would be better spent on evangelism as Marc said. Hence the +1
I think, and I am fully able to be convinced that I am wrong on this, that ReactOS should focus on running a core set of FOSS drivers/applications really really really well and maybe supporting two or three generic platforms. x86/64 and Arm are GOOD targets. Let commercial vendors certify and invest the resources in supporting a more broader set of proprietary applications and exotic platforms. By the nature of the GPL ReactOS will feed on these changes and get better.
Let it be what it is and push those strengths. If Bordeaux, CodeWeavers, Google or the OnTime RTOS guys want to make investments in other areas, by all means support them, beg them, merge in changes from them, whatever is needed to make ReactOS better.
If someone wants to work on exotic stuff, more power to them. I love the bringup work on arm,ppc and compiler targets like msvc and friends but I don't think its reasonable for ReactOS to SUPPORT by default to ever be able to run 100% everything for Windows and do all of these extra things that windows currently is not marketed to do. Hell one windows version to the next can't run 100% of everything from the prior one. There is no reason for ReactOS to claim to be the greatest thing since sliced bread when its not. It IS however a great learning platform, it IS a great target for embedded development, it IS a great target for a VM based legacy platform.