Our friendly OS project Haiku gets accepted every year, so being an OS is not a problem. Wine is certainly accepted every year from the beginning, and this year is not an exception. So it's definately not a problem of "legal fear" of Microsoft.
In the same spirit of sharing from the FOSDEM invitation, I'm sure we could find some projects on Haiku that would benefit ReactOS as well. Some time ago I talked about the webcam driver I wrote, which could likely be made portable. Another developer already started adding UVC support to it, so it'd likely be interesting to ROS as well.
Thanks a lot, but this could limit your own participation, since number of slots is usually very limited. It's really nice to offer this from your side.
It seems it might be possible to actually have someone from ReactOS to mentor such a project. This would free our own mentors to supervise other projects, so from this point of view it could allow having more. Also, we would both benefit in having more models supported on this driver.
Also, something that seemed to appeal to Google last year was our attempt at extending the allocated GSoC slots by running our own funded HCD (Haiku Code Drive), to sponsor some more projects. see: http://www.haiku-os.org/tags/hcd2008_0
We are preparing a similar thing called Community Funded Ideas. It's not ready for big announcement yet, but we are working towards it.
Good to hear.
François.