30 Oct
2008
30 Oct
'08
3:24 p.m.
Gentlemen,
If you don't mind me intruding, I'd like to propose some things I think
may ease life for us poor ROS devs, existing and new ones :)
First of all, I'd like to suggest 'apprenticeship programming', also
known by other names, but which commonly involves having one seasoned
programmer in charge of a particular (sub-)project and one or more
programmers following his lead. These latter programmers would be less
experienced but could work on relatively advanced stuff due to the lead
of the seasoned programmer. This model is commonly used in companies
already and if adapted for ROS it should make it much easier for
'newbie' devs to get started, pick up experience and become seasoned
devs themselves.
My own experience with picking up the USB subproject reflect this as
well. It's hard to get started without much of a lead, especially when
one's experience with the NT subsystems is limited. This is also where
documentation would have helped, bringing me to my second point:
Whenever I start a new project or implementation I first write a
technical specification detailing the exact layout, APIs and
implementation. I've heard that this is common practice in professional
programming as well as other areas. Benefits include having a good
overview of the project before one starts on it, being able to pick out
obvious oversights before writing a single line of code, having a
central place of reference (code does _not_ work for this), allows one
to quickly pick up on things during maintenance sessions (many months
later...). It'd also enable the apprentice programming system and make
it easy for the central project leader(s) to get an overview of the
progress being made.
Documentation and specifications are often ignored by programmers
because they're not deemed 'time-efficient', preferring to start
programming right away instead. In my experience and those of everyone
in high-level jobs involving anything from programming to hardware
design (like my housemate who is a senior engineer in a Dutch company
which designs chips for the telecom industry), specifications and
documentation are the lifeblood of any project.
I have elected to use both the apprentice method as well as the
documentation approach in my work on the new installer, bootloader and
USB stack for ReactOS, attracting two relatively inexperienced but
highly motivated devs for the installer (RI2, or ROSE) project already.
They have expressed interest in helping me with further projects in ROS
as well, even more low-level things. I think that this is a good example
of the future ROS should be heading towards.
So yeah, that's my rant I guess :)
*ducks and runs for cover*
Maya Posch
30 Oct
30 Oct
4:01 p.m.
Two points in reply to try to help you understand why you're seeing these
problems.
Firstly, it's almost impossible to get developers working on a project in
their spare time to work on documentation.
Any spare time they get to play wouldn't be spent on writing documentation,
it's just too boring. Trying to force people to write docs would just drive
them away, so it's sort of a catch22 situation.
When a project gets larger, they hopefully attract technical writers who can
fill this void.
Secondly, this is an NT operating system. There is more documentation
already written for NT than you could ever dare to read.
If you know the area you're working on then things should start to make
sense when you have the code.
Let's take the USB project you mentioned.
I know people hate it when this answer is used, but knowing how to write NT
drivers and having the source code for the driver, plus having a
specification to reference is generally enough.
Driver devs know the Windows driver model and how it works, so that's half
the battle. There's a vast amount of official documentation for the USB
standard, so that's taken care of too.
In industry, documentation is generally used because the engineering behind
the project is still being designed, the devs have no knowledge of the
architecture of what they're writing, only the architecture of what it's
running on (windows).
Thus, you'll generally see design and interface specs for whatever bespoke
engineering project they're working on. But, for the OS itself, they'll have
Windows Internals and Driver Model books. This documentation is already
written, and this is what we as ReactOS devs also use.
Hope that makes sense
Ged.
-----Original Message-----
From: ros-dev-bounces(a)reactos.org [mailto:ros-dev-bounces@reactos.org] On
Behalf Of Maya Posch
Sent: 30 October 2008 15:24
To: ReactOS Development List
Subject: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new developers
Gentlemen,
If you don't mind me intruding, I'd like to propose some things I think
may ease life for us poor ROS devs, existing and new ones :)
First of all, I'd like to suggest 'apprenticeship programming', also
known by other names, but which commonly involves having one seasoned
programmer in charge of a particular (sub-)project and one or more
programmers following his lead. These latter programmers would be less
experienced but could work on relatively advanced stuff due to the lead
of the seasoned programmer. This model is commonly used in companies
already and if adapted for ROS it should make it much easier for
'newbie' devs to get started, pick up experience and become seasoned
devs themselves.
My own experience with picking up the USB subproject reflect this as
well. It's hard to get started without much of a lead, especially when
one's experience with the NT subsystems is limited. This is also where
documentation would have helped, bringing me to my second point:
Whenever I start a new project or implementation I first write a
technical specification detailing the exact layout, APIs and
implementation. I've heard that this is common practice in professional
programming as well as other areas. Benefits include having a good
overview of the project before one starts on it, being able to pick out
obvious oversights before writing a single line of code, having a
central place of reference (code does _not_ work for this), allows one
to quickly pick up on things during maintenance sessions (many months
later...). It'd also enable the apprentice programming system and make
it easy for the central project leader(s) to get an overview of the
progress being made.
Documentation and specifications are often ignored by programmers
because they're not deemed 'time-efficient', preferring to start
programming right away instead. In my experience and those of everyone
in high-level jobs involving anything from programming to hardware
design (like my housemate who is a senior engineer in a Dutch company
which designs chips for the telecom industry), specifications and
documentation are the lifeblood of any project.
I have elected to use both the apprentice method as well as the
documentation approach in my work on the new installer, bootloader and
USB stack for ReactOS, attracting two relatively inexperienced but
highly motivated devs for the installer (RI2, or ROSE) project already.
They have expressed interest in helping me with further projects in ROS
as well, even more low-level things. I think that this is a good example
of the future ROS should be heading towards.
So yeah, that's my rant I guess :)
*ducks and runs for cover*
Maya Posch
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
31 Oct
31 Oct
8:18 a.m.
gedmurphy wrote:
Two points in reply to try to help you understand why
you're seeing these
problems.
Firstly, it's almost impossible to get developers working on a project in
their spare time to work on documentation.
Any spare time they get to play wouldn't be spent on writing documentation,
it's just too boring. Trying to force people to write docs would just drive
them away, so it's sort of a catch22 situation.
When a project gets larger, they hopefully attract technical writers who can
fill this void.
Not writing documentation/specifications already limits the maximum size
of a project and thus reduces the possibility of anyone jumping in to
fill the (documentation) void. I personally don't like working with
people who can not send me a document on or tell me in a few sentences
what it is I need to know. It gets really tiresome if you have to keep
chasing after people because you need to know something and they're only
available 1 hour for you due to timezones.
If those people do not want to write documentation, fine, have someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Secondly, this is an NT operating system. There is more documentation
already written for NT than you could ever dare to read.
If you know the area you're working on then things should start to make
sense when you have the code.
Let's take the USB project you mentioned.
I know people hate it when this answer is used, but knowing how to write NT
drivers and having the source code for the driver, plus having a
specification to reference is generally enough.
Driver devs know the Windows driver model and how it works, so that's half
the battle. There's a vast amount of official documentation for the USB
standard, so that's taken care of too.
With the USB project I'm having to read a few specs, a dozen books, more
online articles. I don't know how the Windows internals work or even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them. I find the
available information to be insufficient or at least very poorly
condensed. Yes, the USB spec is very clear, but doesn't directly apply
to the Windows implementation. For that there are other sources, sure,
but they are often outdated, unclear and mostly importantly seldom
directly apply to my needs or explain things in a way a noob like me
could understand. This slows me down immensely.
In industry, documentation is generally used because the engineering behind
the project is still being designed, the devs have no knowledge of the
architecture of what they're writing, only the architecture of what it's
running on (windows).
Thus, you'll generally see design and interface specs for whatever bespoke
engineering project they're working on. But, for the OS itself, they'll have
Windows Internals and Driver Model books. This documentation is already
written, and this is what we as ReactOS devs also use.
Not true. If I look at my house mate's company and the companies he
works with (Alcatel, Lucent and others) it is clear that documentation
is used long beyond the initial design phase. As an example, my
housemate is working on finishing a project at the moment which has its
roots in a design Alcatel (Italian company) designed years ago. Because
the Alcatel engineers didn't bother to properly document the system back
then it resulted in a world of pain for both the Germans (Lucent) and my
house mate's company (AimCom). The Italians' constant refusal to
document system components in a proper manner let alone follow up on
deadlines has been really dragging down the project.
But still, those three plus a few other companies have been swapping
documentation and specs like there's no tomorrow. The spec for each part
takes hundreds of pages and details everything into excruciating detail.
I honestly can't think of how such a project would work without those
piles of pages filled with all of the information one'd need to
implement the project.
As for your argument that those books classify as 'documentation', I
disagree. They make for adequate reference works whenever the
information in them is current, but the point of a specification is to
have only the information one needs to implement a project together in
one document, not spread throughout a dozen or more reference books.
Those works also don't mention exact implementation details, TODOs or
other project-specific information. Generic info doesn't equal a
specification.
This aside from the point that you'd be spending a few hundred euro just
buying those books you reference, something every ROS dev would have to
do. We don't want to condone copyright infringement, do we?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet peeves ^_^
Maya
8:58 a.m.
Maya Posch wrote:
I don't know how the Windows internals work or
even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know this will you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and understand the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
If those people do not want to write documentation,
fine, have someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that
come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet peeves ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people _hate_ this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th. The code is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to change this at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
10:13 a.m.
I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere fast. If nobody is willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal? Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Maya Posch wrote:
I don't know how the Windows internals work
or even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know this will you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and understand the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
If those people do not want to write
documentation, fine, have someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words
that come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet peeves ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people _hate_ this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th. The code is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to change this at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev 
10:53 a.m.
Maya Posch wrote:
I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere fast. If
nobody is willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal? Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
I don't know how the Windows internals work
or even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on
ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know this will you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and understand the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
If those people do not want to write
documentation, fine, have someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words
that come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet peeves ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
_hate_ this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th. The code is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to change this at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
1:33 p.m.
In regards to your previous e-mail of not understanding the
architecture, have you read Windows Internals 4th Edition?
In terms of driver writing, have you read Programming the WDK Model
and Writing Windows 2000 Device Drivers? Both are excellent books and
very clear/concise.
Have you taken a look at the documentation in the WDK?
Have you looked at the "going deep" kernel videos on Channel 9?
Have you looked through Dave Probert's slides?
Have you considered getting the David Solomon Inside Windows 2000
Video DVDs? (There's an extra DVD that covers XP/2003).
If the architecture isn't obvious from those materials, then I'm
afraid the reference isn't to blame. Stefan's a 16 year old with no
formal CS background and he was still able to pick up most of the
arch, as was Samuel (encoded), who is also just 18.
Asking ReactOS developers to "write more documentation on ReactOS" is
basically asking "Write documentation on Windows".
There are already millions of books and websites on the matter,
there's nothing relevant we could add, even if we *wanted* to.
If you haven't read through *all* those sources I gave you, then
really, it's not the devs here that need to be blamed...
On 31-Oct-08, at 6:13 AM, Maya Posch wrote:
I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere fast. If
nobody is
willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then it's
not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal?
Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev I don't know how the Windows internals work
or even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know this
will you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to
ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and learned
the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and
understand the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
If those people do not want to write
documentation, fine, have
someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend
anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words
that come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet
peeves ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
_hate_ this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th. The
code is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to change
this at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev 
1:39 p.m.
If reactos is (and will probably be for a long time) a hobby OS is a
consequence of our all-or-nothing strategy. ReactOS is trying to clone
Windows as a whole inset of different OS based on the NT design like stated
on the homepage. IMHO it's plain wrong because it's a very ambitious goal
and it's even naive to think that 10+ part time developers can deliver a
serious os to compete against the resources Microsoft or even Linux has. At
current progress when we hit 1.0 will be too late for reactos , that simple.
Do we need directx at this point? tenths of useless stubbed dlls ? 3
undergoing architecture ports? You name it. Don't take me wrong that's
technically amazing but not an smart strategy if we don't want to become an
eternal promising project in alpha state and nothing more.
As a consequence of that ReactOS codebase has grown out of control. Any
developer can pick any area of his interest, start working on it and then
suddenly stop and start working on another thing. The current situation is
that we have a monster with multiple legs but very few finished parts. IMHO
we should better concentrate on a few key areas only (and I mean really few)
and work all together in that direction to deliver something usable now , in
a year timeframe , even if it's just a basic (but stable) kernel to run
firefox on. I think it's better to give reactos a real world use now than
deliver an NT5 clone in 5 years being optimistic.
A few possible solutions to discuss:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user oriented website when no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun, nice ,
but non productive users . If you take a brief look at our webpage the first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook . IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design .It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based hardware?
- Defining a serious, closed , roadmap with realistic dates that doesn't
sound like joke, and enforce it.
Regards
/Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Daniel Reimer" <reimer.daniel(a)freenet.de>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:53 AM
To: "ReactOS Development List" <ros-dev(a)reactos.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new developers
Maya Posch wrote:
I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere
fast. If nobody is willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal? Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
I don't know how the Windows internals work
or even
look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know this will
you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and understand
the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
If those people do not want to write
documentation, fine, have someone
else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put them in
charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
project as a whole but only their small island.
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words
that come to mind.
Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet peeves ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people _hate_
this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th. The code
is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to change this
at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
1:42 p.m.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Marc Piulachs <marc.piulachs(a)live.com> wrote:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user
oriented website when no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun, nice ,
but non productive users . If you take a brief look at our webpage the first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook . IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design .It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based hardware?
+1
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
1:54 p.m.
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.
On 31-Oct-08, at 9:42 AM, Steven Edwards wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Marc Piulachs
<marc.piulachs(a)live.com> wrote:
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user
oriented website
when no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more
fun, nice ,
but non productive users . If you take a brief look at our webpage
the first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and
OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times
has someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about
ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook . IMHO we should turn into a
more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as
windows killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS
design .It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project.
Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on
universities and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and
promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable
right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a
headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based
hardware?
+1
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
2:43 p.m.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Alex Ionescu <ionucu(a)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.
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
3:14 p.m.
This is the point where Maya mistakes most of all: ReactOS is an
opensource and a FREE project. Managing and working in an opensource
project is different.
We can't compare ReactOS engineering technologies with Alcatel
engineering technologies. Or with Microsoft technologies.
But I try to keep the most valuable what we have in ReactOS, and what
is lost in some other project which tries to provide Windows
compatibility - freedom. And my intention is to keep this even after
commercial ReactOS vendors appear.
I won't repeat all valid points Ged, Alex and Steven said, and some
of Marc's email is right too.
One can demand something from another team member, but the difference
is that the result very well may be as Alex outlined in his fishing
analogy.
As for another question, by Marc or by Alexandru, there is no real
development roadmap of ReactOS, the one on the website should
actually be removed, since it's mostly incorrect.
WBR,
Aleksey Bragin.
On Oct 31, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Alex Ionescu 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.
3:18 p.m.
And this would be why I've been hounding you, my good Aleksey, to try and at
least set down some guidelines for what we want accomplished at each
milestone.
6:58 p.m.
And a new thread will start - "Project leader sabotages DirectX
development! Panic! ReactOS shutdown!". Oh, have we already had that
drama?
Milestones will be set, there are some other things pending.
On Oct 31, 2008, at 6:18 PM, Zachary Gorden wrote:
And this would be why I've been hounding you, my
good Aleksey, to
try and at least set down some guidelines for what we want
accomplished at each milestone.
3:36 p.m.
Aleksey Bragin wrote:
This is the point where Maya mistakes most of all:
ReactOS is an
opensource and a FREE project. Managing and working in an opensource
project is different.
Of course it's different. You can't expect people to work from 9 - 5
like in a company. I'm well aware of that. But why would it suddenly be
a big no-no to employ the same tactics which make commercial projects
such a success, like proper management, a schedule to which people stick
(with some more tolerance, of course) and in general a sense of
professionalism and focus.
We can't compare ReactOS engineering technologies with Alcatel
engineering technologies. Or with Microsoft technologies.
But I try to keep the most valuable what we have in ReactOS, and what
is lost in some other project which tries to provide Windows
compatibility - freedom. And my intention is to keep this even after
commercial ReactOS vendors appear.
As some may know, I've got my own software/R&D company and have some
people working for me with expansions planned this and next year. I
consider freedom to be the biggest asset as well. I want to me my
employees feel at home, wanted and free to share their ideas. How
ReactOS can offer more freedom I don't know. Heck, we even pay people :)
As for another question, by Marc or by Alexandru, there is no real
development roadmap of ReactOS, the one on the website should
actually be removed, since it's mostly incorrect.
Well, I guess that kind of settles it then. I'm willing to spend some of
my spare time on a project I like, but only if I feel that my time is
not wasted while following inefficient procedures and chasing devs
because nobody bothers to write down implementation details (NT
references != ROS implementation details. D'oh).
For now I'll finish the ROSE installer project, but after that I'm not
sure what I'll do. Perhaps I'll put my own OS together based on *BSD or
so, or fork ReactOS, or... we'll see ;)
At any rate I don't foresee ReactOS going anywhere soon within the next
5 years, and I don't want to be part of such a frustrating experience.
So long and thanks for the fish.
Maya
3:40 p.m.
Wiadomość napisana w dniu 2008-10-31, o godz. 16:36, przez Maya Posch:
Of course it's different. You can't expect
people to work from 9 - 5
like in a company. I'm well aware of that. But why would it suddenly
be
a big no-no to employ the same tactics which make commercial projects
such a success, like proper management, a schedule to which people
stick
(with some more tolerance, of course) and in general a sense of
professionalism and focus.
You have a very naive view of how software development in the
corporational world out there really works. Just a hint: over 75% of
commercial projects just plain fail completely.
➧ Marcin Dalecki ❖
4:03 p.m.
And something close to 99% of FOSS projects. In the corporate world it's
due to stupid managers, in the FOSS world due to lack of management.
Pick your poison?
Maya
Marcin Dalecki wrote:
Wiadomość napisana w dniu 2008-10-31, o godz. 16:36,
przez Maya Posch:
Of course it's different. You can't
expect people to work from 9 - 5
like in a company. I'm well aware of that. But why would it suddenly
be
a big no-no to employ the same tactics which make commercial projects
such a success, like proper management, a schedule to which people
stick
(with some more tolerance, of course) and in general a sense of
professionalism and focus.
You have a very naive view of how software development in the
corporational world out there really works. Just a hint: over 75% of
commercial projects just plain fail completely.
➧ Marcin Dalecki ❖
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
5:49 p.m.
Generally, if you've written something that follows the NT specification and
it doesn't work in ROS but does work in NT, then it's our fault and it's up
to us to fix ROS so that what you wrote will work. You really shouldn't be
hacking whatever you work on so that it works in ROS.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Alex Ionescu <ionucu(a)videotron.ca> wrote:
Thanks for choosing to completely ignore my e-mail :)
On 31-Oct-08, at 11:36 AM, Maya Posch wrote:
because nobody bothers to write down
implementation details (NT
references != ROS implementation details. D'oh).
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
7:13 p.m.
Similar offers appear quite regularly, some people come out of
nowhere, and start telling us - hey, you have a bad management, you
don't have a business-plan, you don't have regular developers
meeting, you don't demand work from developers regularly, you don't
set priorities right - developers should work on XXX instead of YYY,
because XXX is way more [some cool reason, usually referred to the
future].
But please understand, I *know* how professional development is done,
that was my main employment for the at least last 5 years.
Let's see your key sentence:
But why would it suddenly be
a big no-no to employ the same tactics which make commercial projects
such a success, like proper management, a schedule to which people
stick
(with some more tolerance, of course
"proper management" - I'm listening, what should be proper?
"a schedule to which people stick" - all what I said went to nothing.
What kind of schedule are you talkign about? If Klemens have exams,
if Johannes have exams at different time, if Stefan is busy with
school, if Alex can't answer my question because he works in another
company. What can I demand from people? Set them deadlines? Blame
them? A perfect way to loose developers, and a perfect way to
unmotivate.
I recently had a similar talk with Arty, where I said that I
immediately begin to hate any good task when someone demands
completion from me (Z98 - that doesn't apply to you.. well... yet ;)).
So, any more offers how to make us better, rather than just saying
facts that ReactOS should work better than Windows 7 now, and it
works worse?
WBR,
Aleksey.
On Oct 31, 2008, at 6:36 PM, Maya Posch wrote:
Aleksey Bragin wrote:
This is the point where Maya mistakes most of
all: ReactOS is an
opensource and a FREE project. Managing and working in an opensource
project is different.
Of course it's different. You can't expect people to work from 9 - 5
like in a company. I'm well aware of that. But why would it
suddenly be
a big no-no to employ the same tactics which make commercial projects
such a success, like proper management, a schedule to which people
stick
(with some more tolerance, of course) and in general a sense of
professionalism and focus.
We can't compare ReactOS engineering technologies with Alcatel
engineering technologies. Or with Microsoft technologies.
But I try to keep the most valuable what we have in ReactOS, and what
is lost in some other project which tries to provide Windows
compatibility - freedom. And my intention is to keep this even after
commercial ReactOS vendors appear.
As some may know, I've got my own software/R&D company and have some
people working for me with expansions planned this and next year. I
consider freedom to be the biggest asset as well. I want to me my
employees feel at home, wanted and free to share their ideas. How
ReactOS can offer more freedom I don't know. Heck, we even pay
people :)
As for another question, by Marc or by Alexandru, there is no real
development roadmap of ReactOS, the one on the website should
actually be removed, since it's mostly incorrect.
Well, I guess that kind of settles it then. I'm willing to spend
some of
my spare time on a project I like, but only if I feel that my time is
not wasted while following inefficient procedures and chasing devs
because nobody bothers to write down implementation details (NT
references != ROS implementation details. D'oh).
For now I'll finish the ROSE installer project, but after that I'm not
sure what I'll do. Perhaps I'll put my own OS together based on
*BSD or
so, or fork ReactOS, or... we'll see ;)
At any rate I don't foresee ReactOS going anywhere soon within the
next
5 years, and I don't want to be part of such a frustrating experience.
So long and thanks for the fish.
Maya
7:32 p.m.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Aleksey Bragin <aleksey(a)reactos.org> wrote:
"proper management" - I'm listening,
what should be proper?
"a schedule to which people stick" - all what I said went to nothing.
What kind of schedule are you talkign about? If Klemens have exams,
if Johannes have exams at different time, if Stefan is busy with
school, if Alex can't answer my question because he works in another
company. What can I demand from people? Set them deadlines? Blame
them? A perfect way to loose developers, and a perfect way to
unmotivate.
Proper Management in FOSS is exactly what you've been doing and the
core team have been doing. A laissez-faire method is the only way to
go if you want rapid development. I for one hate threads like this
because I fear you getting burned out or getting disenchanted and
you've been a very good coordinator for the project. Please don't take
my comments before as criticism of flaws, more like suggestive
'enhancements'.
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
1:52 p.m.
Old arguments, but I'll dissect them again for the rookies:
On 31-Oct-08, at 9:39 AM, Marc Piulachs wrote:
If reactos is (and will probably be for a long time) a
hobby OS is a
consequence of our all-or-nothing strategy. ReactOS is trying to clone
Windows as a whole inset of different OS based on the NT design like
stated
on the homepage. IMHO it's plain wrong because it's a very ambitious
goal
and it's even naive to think that 10+ part time developers can
deliver a
serious os to compete against the resources Microsoft or even Linux
has. At
current progress when we hit 1.0 will be too late for reactos , that
simple.
Dave Cutler and his band of 12 delivered on that promise in 3 years.
I don't see why a group of 10+ *dedicated and focused* part-time
developers couldn't do the same in 6, considering how much more we
know about computers today and the fact we don't have to start from
nearly scratch. It's already been 5 out of 6.
But ReactOS is not a team of "dedicated and focused" part-time
developers.
Why not? Because they're not getting paid, and they have absolutely NO
reason to help this project other that it's a hobby.
They have defintely much less reasons to listen to someone telling
them how they should enjoy that hobby.
Imagine you're fishing, and someone comes to tell you "actually,
you're part of a big lake-wide fishing project, and we already have
too many trouts. We'd like you to fish salmon instead".
Yeah, f*ck off is likely the reply.
Do we need directx at this point? tenths of useless stubbed dlls ? 3
undergoing architecture ports? You name it. Don't take me wrong that's
technically amazing but not an smart strategy if we don't want to
become an
eternal promising project in alpha state and nothing more.
As useless as I think DirectX is, it's the NUMBER ONE thing that will
attract people to ReactOS.
Get StarCraft to run on an OS that doesn't even support multiple CPUs
yet, and people will LOVE it. You could probably sell it to half of
Korea by then.
Useless stubbed DLLs? They're not useless -- almost each one of them
made one more little app work. Or a big app. Any of those apps could
be what a company is wanting to run, and nothing else.
Three architecture ports? The 64-bit port has fixed dozens if not
hundreds of header bugs and incorrect types. The ARM port completely
re-architected parts of FreeLDR and the memory manager (even on x86)
and also brought us a RAMdisk driver. The ARM port even uses a 100%-
native ARC loader code compatible with WinLDR, that the x86 port could
start using too. All those were important changes.
As a consequence of that ReactOS codebase has grown out of control.
Any
developer can pick any area of his interest, start working on it and
then
suddenly stop and start working on another thing.
Welcome to open source.
The current situation is
that we have a monster with multiple legs but very few finished
parts. IMHO
we should better concentrate on a few key areas only (and I mean
really few)
and work all together in that direction to deliver something usable
now , in
a year timeframe , even if it's just a basic (but stable) kernel to
run
firefox on. I think it's better to give reactos a real world use now
than
deliver an NT5 clone in 5 years being optimistic.
And how do you get a bunch of people having fun into the same
direction, for free, without the usage of mind-altering substances?
If you have a solution to that, as much as I love this project, for
your own good, I recommend you publish a paper on it.
You're likely to win the Nobel prize for psychology.
And guess what, while 100% of interested parties will look at ReactOS
right now and say "oooh, they almost have XXX working", if you focus
on ONE goal as you say, then you'll have:
- 4-8% of interested parties looking at ROS and saying "Yay, XXX
works!!"
- 92-96% saying "Wtf, why didn't they work on YYY? I think YYY is way
more important. This project has the wrong goals for me."
Pick your poison.
A few possible solutions to discuss:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user oriented website when
no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun,
nice ,
but non productive users .
Wow, and I thought *I* was arrogant.
Those nice "useless" users are what provide your free advertising,
which attracts companies and developers, you idiot.
If you take a brief look at our webpage the first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and
OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has
someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about
ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook .
Probably less than people have complained the same about Windows Vista.
IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows
killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design
Yeah, I tried doing that. Then Microsoft released the WDK to all
faculty and students.
Hmm...would I rather...study some half-assed implementation of
Windows, or would I rather get the official code from Microsoft, plus
the CRK and official build tools. Hmmm...
.It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities
and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and
promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
Tried that too (see my Waterloo talk). Read what I just wrote above.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable
right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a
headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based
hardware?
See the 100% vs 8% poison above.
- Defining a serious, closed , roadmap with realistic dates that
doesn't
sound like joke, and enforce it.
See the 100% vs 8% poison above, plus the "enforcing rules on unpaid
part-time students/volunteers" above.
Regards
/Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Daniel Reimer" <reimer.daniel(a)freenet.de>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:53 AM
To: "ReactOS Development List" <ros-dev(a)reactos.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new
developers
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere
fast. If nobody is
willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then
it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at
least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal?
Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll
only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't
let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you
can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We
already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Maya Posch wrote:
> I don't know how the Windows internals work or even
> look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
>
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know
this will
you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to
ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and
learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and
understand
the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
> If those people do not want to write documentation, fine, have
> someone
> else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put
> them in
> charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
> project as a whole but only their small island.
>
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend
anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
> Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that come to mind.
> Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet
> peeves ^_^
>
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
_hate_
this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th.
The code
is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to
change this
at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
2:33 p.m.
Marc,
I'm one of the "non productive" users that you talk about. In this world
there is a business concept called "networking." To put it short, you join a
networking organization instead of advertising your market presence. People
will find out that you exist and so, they may request your products/services
or pass the word on.
Two stories are frequently told in business networking circles.
"You don't know who they know"
In short, some guy who advised large corporations on their finances, if I
remember correctly, was looking for referrals. He was approached by a woman
running a small flower shop who said "all right, what do you do?" and he
answered something along the lines of "I work with people that you don't
know and will never meet" and he turned away. The lady's clients were very
big and wealthy corporate executives, her father in law was another rich
executive, etc. She smiled (as mentioned in that book, "but she wasn't going
to talk nicely about him").
"You don't know how well they know who they know"
This time it was about a gardener who said "I'll get you some referrals" to
another such corporate gray-suit advisor. The latter kept thinking about the
gardener being a peon, a digger in the dirt, not having leverage on his
clients at all. In reality, the guy was respected by very rich executives'
wives. He reportedly asked one of them if "what his advisor told him is
correct" and he stated that the advisor told him about how to save with some
legal tax cuts. The lady answered "hmm...that's interesting, I'll need to
check, could you please tell me the name of your advisor again?"
In other words, Alex Ionescu is completely right. We, the monkeys, the
cattle, refer you people to others like us, until Super Cow or Dexter's
"Monkey" will hear about you and will want to invest.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Alex Ionescu <ionucu(a)videotron.ca> wrote:
Old arguments, but I'll dissect them again for the
rookies:
On 31-Oct-08, at 9:39 AM, Marc Piulachs wrote:
If reactos is (and will probably be for a long
time) a hobby OS is a
consequence of our all-or-nothing strategy. ReactOS is trying to clone
Windows as a whole inset of different OS based on the NT design like
stated
on the homepage. IMHO it's plain wrong because it's a very ambitious
goal
and it's even naive to think that 10+ part time developers can
deliver a
serious os to compete against the resources Microsoft or even Linux
has. At
current progress when we hit 1.0 will be too late for reactos , that
simple.
Dave Cutler and his band of 12 delivered on that promise in 3 years.
I don't see why a group of 10+ *dedicated and focused* part-time
developers couldn't do the same in 6, considering how much more we
know about computers today and the fact we don't have to start from
nearly scratch. It's already been 5 out of 6.
But ReactOS is not a team of "dedicated and focused" part-time
developers.
Why not? Because they're not getting paid, and they have absolutely NO
reason to help this project other that it's a hobby.
They have defintely much less reasons to listen to someone telling
them how they should enjoy that hobby.
Imagine you're fishing, and someone comes to tell you "actually,
you're part of a big lake-wide fishing project, and we already have
too many trouts. We'd like you to fish salmon instead".
Yeah, f*ck off is likely the reply.
Do we need directx at this point? tenths of useless stubbed dlls ? 3
undergoing architecture ports? You name it. Don't take me wrong that's
technically amazing but not an smart strategy if we don't want to
become an
eternal promising project in alpha state and nothing more.
As useless as I think DirectX is, it's the NUMBER ONE thing that will
attract people to ReactOS.
Get StarCraft to run on an OS that doesn't even support multiple CPUs
yet, and people will LOVE it. You could probably sell it to half of
Korea by then.
Useless stubbed DLLs? They're not useless -- almost each one of them
made one more little app work. Or a big app. Any of those apps could
be what a company is wanting to run, and nothing else.
Three architecture ports? The 64-bit port has fixed dozens if not
hundreds of header bugs and incorrect types. The ARM port completely
re-architected parts of FreeLDR and the memory manager (even on x86)
and also brought us a RAMdisk driver. The ARM port even uses a 100%-
native ARC loader code compatible with WinLDR, that the x86 port could
start using too. All those were important changes.
As a consequence of that ReactOS codebase has grown out of control.
Any
developer can pick any area of his interest, start working on it and
then
suddenly stop and start working on another thing.
Welcome to open source.
The current situation is
that we have a monster with multiple legs but very few finished
parts. IMHO
we should better concentrate on a few key areas only (and I mean
really few)
and work all together in that direction to deliver something usable
now , in
a year timeframe , even if it's just a basic (but stable) kernel to
run
firefox on. I think it's better to give reactos a real world use now
than
deliver an NT5 clone in 5 years being optimistic.
And how do you get a bunch of people having fun into the same
direction, for free, without the usage of mind-altering substances?
If you have a solution to that, as much as I love this project, for
your own good, I recommend you publish a paper on it.
You're likely to win the Nobel prize for psychology.
And guess what, while 100% of interested parties will look at ReactOS
right now and say "oooh, they almost have XXX working", if you focus
on ONE goal as you say, then you'll have:
- 4-8% of interested parties looking at ROS and saying "Yay, XXX
works!!"
- 92-96% saying "Wtf, why didn't they work on YYY? I think YYY is way
more important. This project has the wrong goals for me."
Pick your poison.
A few possible solutions to discuss:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user oriented website when
no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun,
nice ,
but non productive users .
Wow, and I thought *I* was arrogant.
Those nice "useless" users are what provide your free advertising,
which attracts companies and developers, you idiot.
If you take a brief look at our webpage the
first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and
OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has
someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about
ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook .
Probably less than people have complained the same about Windows Vista.
IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows
killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design
Yeah, I tried doing that. Then Microsoft released the WDK to all
faculty and students.
Hmm...would I rather...study some half-assed implementation of
Windows, or would I rather get the official code from Microsoft, plus
the CRK and official build tools. Hmmm...
.It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities
and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and
promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
Tried that too (see my Waterloo talk). Read what I just wrote above.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable
right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a
headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based
hardware?
See the 100% vs 8% poison above.
- Defining a serious, closed , roadmap with realistic dates that
doesn't
sound like joke, and enforce it.
See the 100% vs 8% poison above, plus the "enforcing rules on unpaid
part-time students/volunteers" above.
Regards
/Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Daniel Reimer" <reimer.daniel(a)freenet.de>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:53 AM
To: "ReactOS Development List" <ros-dev(a)reactos.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new
developers
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere
fast. If nobody is
willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then
it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at
least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal?
Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll
only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't
let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
> Maya Posch wrote:
>
>
>> I don't know how the Windows internals work or even
>> look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
>>
> Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
> especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
> religiously.
> You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
> architecture
> _and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know
> this will
> you
> be in a position to write good code.
>
> Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to
> ReactOS
> knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and
> learned the
> architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and
> understand
> the
> kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
>
>
>
>> If those people do not want to write documentation, fine, have
>> someone
>> else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put
>> them in
>> charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
>> project as a whole but only their small island.
>>
> Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend
> anyone?
> Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
> Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
>
>
>
>> Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that come to mind.
>> Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet
>> peeves ^_^
>>
> I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
> _hate_
> this
> answer...
> A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
> The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th.
> The code
> is
> the fine, granular documentation.
>
>
> As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to
> change this
> at
> the moment.
> This is open source....
> It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ros-dev mailing list
> Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
> http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
>
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you
can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We
already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
3:09 p.m.
A few comments under your own words
Of course! Anyone said having DirectX support is bad for reactos , like
having a SMB implementation or a printing subsystem or any other major
feature any modern OS has , but what's the effort required (man hours or
$$$) to implement such features? . I was just talking about priorities. I
see you like metaphors. Imagine we are building a car and someone is working
on a ultra HI-FI stereo system when the car has only three wheels and burns
in fire after driving it for 5 minutes . Doesn't sound too smart spending so
much time working on the stero just because every body likes listening to
music while driving.
I may be likely to win the Novel for psychology prize but you probably too.
Different people has different motivations , for some people is money , for
others are challanges , some want to have fun while others have
philosophical motivations.
I see It's a very effective way to attract companies we currently have like
... ehmm ... err .. well, too large list to name only a few
/Regards
Do we need
directx at this point? tenths of useless stubbed dlls ? 3
undergoing architecture ports? You name it. Don't take me wrong that's
technically amazing but not an smart strategy if we don't want to
become an
eternal promising project in alpha state and nothing more.
As useless as I think DirectX is, it's the NUMBER ONE thing that will
attract people to ReactOS.
Get StarCraft to run on an OS that doesn't even support multiple CPUs
yet, and people will LOVE it. You could probably sell it to half of
Korea by then.
Useless stubbed DLLs? They're not useless --
almost each one of them
made one more little app work. Or a big app. Any of those apps could
be what a company is wanting to run, and nothing else.
Three architecture ports? The 64-bit port has fixed dozens if not
hundreds of header bugs and incorrect types. The ARM port completely
re-architected parts of FreeLDR and the memory manager (even on x86)
and also brought us a RAMdisk driver. The ARM port even uses a 100%-
native ARC loader code compatible with WinLDR, that the x86 port could
start using too. All those were important changes.
>
Yeah, please , look at the moon and not my finger. Everybody agrees that
having ports is great! twenty better than three , but again I was talking
about improving project's ultra limited resources.
As a consequence of that ReactOS codebase has grown out of control.
Any
developer can pick any area of his interest, start working on it and
then
suddenly stop and start working on another thing.
Welcome to open source.
The current situation is
that we have a monster with multiple legs but very few finished
parts. IMHO
we should better concentrate on a few key areas only (and I mean
really few)
and work all together in that direction to deliver something usable
now , in
a year timeframe , even if it's just a basic (but stable) kernel to
run
firefox on. I think it's better to give reactos a real world use now
than
deliver an NT5 clone in 5 years being optimistic.
And how do you get a bunch of people having fun into the same
direction, for free, without the usage of mind-altering substances?
If you have a solution to that, as much as I love this project, for
your own good, I recommend you publish a paper on it.
You're likely to win the Nobel prize for psychology.
And guess what, while 100% of interested parties will look at ReactOS
right now and say "oooh, they almost have XXX working", if you focus
on ONE goal as you say, then you'll have:
- 4-8% of interested parties looking at ROS and saying "Yay, XXX
works!!"
- 92-96% saying "Wtf, why didn't they work on YYY? I think YYY is way
more important. This project has the wrong goals for me."
Pick your poison.
You are talking about a nearly finished product that as far as I know is not
the case , I'm talking about today when we got a 100% parties saying "Ohh
nice features but can't use it for anything in real life because nothing
really works" . I agree with long term goals (having a Windows like OS) but
I think these features could be implemented in an incremental manner. In
other words , lowering features for a 1.0 release.
A few possible solutions to discuss:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user oriented website when
no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun,
nice ,
but non productive users .
Wow, and I thought *I* was arrogant.
Those nice "useless" users are what provide your free advertising,
which attracts companies and developers, you idiot.
If you take a brief look at our webpage the
first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and
OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has
someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about
ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook .
Probably less than people have complained the same about Windows Vista.
IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows
killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design
Yeah, I tried doing that. Then Microsoft released the WDK to all
faculty and students.
Hmm...would I rather...study some half-assed implementation of
Windows, or would I rather get the official code from Microsoft, plus
the CRK and official build tools. Hmmm...
.It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities
and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and
promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
Tried that too (see my Waterloo talk). Read what I just wrote above.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable
right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a
headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based
hardware?
See the 100% vs 8% poison above.
- Defining a serious, closed , roadmap with realistic dates that
doesn't
sound like joke, and enforce it.
See the 100% vs 8% poison above, plus the "enforcing rules on unpaid
part-time students/volunteers" above.
Regards
/Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Daniel Reimer" <reimer.daniel(a)freenet.de>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:53 AM
To: "ReactOS Development List" <ros-dev(a)reactos.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new
developers
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Maya Posch wrote:
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere
fast. If nobody is
willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then
it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at
least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal?
Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll
only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't
let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
> Maya Posch wrote:
>
>
>> I don't know how the Windows internals work or even
>> look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
>>
> Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
> especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
> religiously.
> You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
> architecture
> _and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know
> this will
> you
> be in a position to write good code.
>
> Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to
> ReactOS
> knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and
> learned the
> architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and
> understand
> the
> kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
>
>
>
>> If those people do not want to write documentation, fine, have
>> someone
>> else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put
>> them in
>> charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
>> project as a whole but only their small island.
>>
> Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend
> anyone?
> Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
> Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
>
>
>
>> Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that come to mind.
>> Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet
>> peeves ^_^
>>
> I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
> _hate_
> this
> answer...
> A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
> The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th.
> The code
> is
> the fine, granular documentation.
>
>
> As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to
> change this
> at
> the moment.
> This is open source....
> It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ros-dev mailing list
> Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
> http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
>
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you
can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We
already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
3:41 p.m.
Marc Piulachs <marc.piulachs(a)live.com> napsal:
Of course! Anyone said having DirectX support is bad
for reactos , like
having a SMB implementation or a printing subsystem or any other major
feature any modern OS has , but what's the effort required (man hours or
$$$) to implement such features? . I was just talking about priorities. I
see you like metaphors. Imagine we are building a car and someone is
working
on a ultra HI-FI stereo system when the car has only three wheels and
burns
in fire after driving it for 5 minutes . Doesn't sound too smart spending
so
much time working on the stero just because every body likes listening to
music while driving.
Well maybe the guy wants to work on the HI-FI and nothing else 'cos he can't
/ don't want to. So what's better?
I say burning car with HI-FI is better than the one without it. At least you
can listen to some fancy music while burning to death.
Regards,
Kamil
4:39 p.m.
Marc Piulachs wrote:
Imagine we are building a car and someone is working
on a ultra HI-FI stereo system when the car has only three wheels and
burns
in fire after driving it for 5 minutes . Doesn't
sound too smart spending
so
much time working on the stero just because every body
likes listening to
music while driving.
But unless you're going to employ people, you can't force them to work on
the 4th wheel or the fire hazard.
People don't come here to be bossed around, they come here for fun.
Take away the fun, lose the devs.
It's better to have 20 devs working on things that interest them, than
trying to force them to work on certain things and ending up with 0 devs.
Ged.
10:41 p.m.
The only documentation I am actually missing is doxygen or something
comparable and up to date.
Maybe someone could get something up and running again?
Timo
3:38 p.m.
Alex and you are absolutely right , I haven't expressed right , I didn't wanted to
say that non developer users are not important, so I shouldn't have used words like
"non productive" or useless. It's great to create a community around
reactos. What I really wanted to say is that IMHO we should change the message our current
website has because reactos is far from being finished and there is no product a non tech
user could be interested on even trying.. it can even create a negative and disappointing
image to the average user seeing screenshots of an OS running Firefox , Office or OO to
download and discover than in just a mirage.
Talking about networking in a marketing conference someone was talking about how a
negative opinion from someone affect other 7 persons around him. If we sent a wrong
message in our website or an unreal image some users may be disappointed and it can turn
against us.
I apologize if I offended anyone.
/Regards
Marc
From: Alexandru Lovin
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 3:33 PM
To: ReactOS Development List
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new developers
Marc,
I'm one of the "non productive" users that you talk about. In this world
there is a business concept called "networking." To put it short, you join a
networking organization instead of advertising your market presence. People will find out
that you exist and so, they may request your products/services or pass the word on.
Two stories are frequently told in business networking circles.
"You don't know who they know"
In short, some guy who advised large corporations on their finances, if I remember
correctly, was looking for referrals. He was approached by a woman running a small flower
shop who said "all right, what do you do?" and he answered something along the
lines of "I work with people that you don't know and will never meet" and he
turned away. The lady's clients were very big and wealthy corporate executives, her
father in law was another rich executive, etc. She smiled (as mentioned in that book,
"but she wasn't going to talk nicely about him").
"You don't know how well they know who they know"
This time it was about a gardener who said "I'll get you some referrals" to
another such corporate gray-suit advisor. The latter kept thinking about the gardener
being a peon, a digger in the dirt, not having leverage on his clients at all. In reality,
the guy was respected by very rich executives' wives. He reportedly asked one of them
if "what his advisor told him is correct" and he stated that the advisor told
him about how to save with some legal tax cuts. The lady answered "hmm...that's
interesting, I'll need to check, could you please tell me the name of your advisor
again?"
In other words, Alex Ionescu is completely right. We, the monkeys, the cattle, refer you
people to others like us, until Super Cow or Dexter's "Monkey" will hear
about you and will want to invest.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Alex Ionescu <ionucu(a)videotron.ca> wrote:
Old arguments, but I'll dissect them again for the rookies:
On 31-Oct-08, at 9:39 AM, Marc Piulachs wrote:
If reactos is (and will probably be for a long time) a
hobby OS is a
consequence of our all-or-nothing strategy. ReactOS is trying to clone
Windows as a whole inset of different OS based on the NT design like
stated
on the homepage. IMHO it's plain wrong because it's a very ambitious
goal
and it's even naive to think that 10+ part time developers can
deliver a
serious os to compete against the resources Microsoft or even Linux
has. At
current progress when we hit 1.0 will be too late for reactos , that
simple.
Dave Cutler and his band of 12 delivered on that promise in 3 years.
I don't see why a group of 10+ *dedicated and focused* part-time
developers couldn't do the same in 6, considering how much more we
know about computers today and the fact we don't have to start from
nearly scratch. It's already been 5 out of 6.
But ReactOS is not a team of "dedicated and focused" part-time
developers.
Why not? Because they're not getting paid, and they have absolutely NO
reason to help this project other that it's a hobby.
They have defintely much less reasons to listen to someone telling
them how they should enjoy that hobby.
Imagine you're fishing, and someone comes to tell you "actually,
you're part of a big lake-wide fishing project, and we already have
too many trouts. We'd like you to fish salmon instead".
Yeah, f*ck off is likely the reply.
Do we need directx at this point? tenths of useless stubbed dlls ? 3
undergoing architecture ports? You name it. Don't take me wrong that's
technically amazing but not an smart strategy if we don't want to
become an
eternal promising project in alpha state and nothing more.
As useless as I think DirectX is, it's the NUMBER ONE thing that will
attract people to ReactOS.
Get StarCraft to run on an OS that doesn't even support multiple CPUs
yet, and people will LOVE it. You could probably sell it to half of
Korea by then.
Useless stubbed DLLs? They're not useless -- almost each one of them
made one more little app work. Or a big app. Any of those apps could
be what a company is wanting to run, and nothing else.
Three architecture ports? The 64-bit port has fixed dozens if not
hundreds of header bugs and incorrect types. The ARM port completely
re-architected parts of FreeLDR and the memory manager (even on x86)
and also brought us a RAMdisk driver. The ARM port even uses a 100%-
native ARC loader code compatible with WinLDR, that the x86 port could
start using too. All those were important changes.
As a consequence of that ReactOS codebase has grown out of control.
Any
developer can pick any area of his interest, start working on it and
then
suddenly stop and start working on another thing.
Welcome to open source.
The current situation is
that we have a monster with multiple legs but very few finished
parts. IMHO
we should better concentrate on a few key areas only (and I mean
really few)
and work all together in that direction to deliver something usable
now , in
a year timeframe , even if it's just a basic (but stable) kernel to
run
firefox on. I think it's better to give reactos a real world use now
than
deliver an NT5 clone in 5 years being optimistic.
And how do you get a bunch of people having fun into the same
direction, for free, without the usage of mind-altering substances?
If you have a solution to that, as much as I love this project, for
your own good, I recommend you publish a paper on it.
You're likely to win the Nobel prize for psychology.
And guess what, while 100% of interested parties will look at ReactOS
right now and say "oooh, they almost have XXX working", if you focus
on ONE goal as you say, then you'll have:
- 4-8% of interested parties looking at ROS and saying "Yay, XXX
works!!"
- 92-96% saying "Wtf, why didn't they work on YYY? I think YYY is way
more important. This project has the wrong goals for me."
Pick your poison.
A few possible solutions to discuss:
- Redefine our target. We have a very end-user oriented website when
no
users actually exist! currently we need developers not yet more fun,
nice ,
but non productive users .
Wow, and I thought *I* was arrogant.
Those nice "useless" users are what provide your free advertising,
which attracts companies and developers, you idiot.
If you take a brief look at our webpage the first
impression is "wow! a free windows clone than runs mozilla and
OpenOffice!!"
but .. it's that what we have? I don't think so.. How many times has
someone
asked in the channel how to run office 2007 or complaining about
ReactOS not
installing into his brand new notebook .
Probably less than people have complained the same about Windows Vista.
IMHO we should turn into a more
developer oriented community . Inset of promoting reactos as windows
killer
we may promote it as learning platform for IT students. As a great
opportunity to study an alternative non unix microkernel OS design
Yeah, I tried doing that. Then Microsoft released the WDK to all
faculty and students.
Hmm...would I rather...study some half-assed implementation of
Windows, or would I rather get the official code from Microsoft, plus
the CRK and official build tools. Hmmm...
.It will
lead into more passionate productive people joining the project. Don't
promote it in international user oriented events but on universities
and
collages, we can give speeches on our respective collages and
promote it
among teachers as learning vehicle.
Tried that too (see my Waterloo talk). Read what I just wrote above.
- Redefine short term goals and turn reactos into something usable
right
now. Could be reactos interesting for the embedded market as a
headless ,
well known Win32 API, tcp/ip enabled OS running on cheap x86 based
hardware?
See the 100% vs 8% poison above.
- Defining a serious, closed , roadmap with realistic dates that
doesn't
sound like joke, and enforce it.
See the 100% vs 8% poison above, plus the "enforcing rules on unpaid
part-time students/volunteers" above.
Regards
/Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Daniel Reimer" <reimer.daniel(a)freenet.de>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:53 AM
To: "ReactOS Development List" <ros-dev(a)reactos.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Regarding documentation and attracting new
developers
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
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Maya Posch wrote:
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http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev I guess this is why ReactOS is going nowhere
fast. If nobody is
willing
to see it as a viable project, even for commercialization, then
it's not
so surprising that no deadlines are ever met and attention from the
public for what could be something even bigger than Linux (at
least on
the desktop) is at around the level of OSS OSs which are little more
than hobby projects. Is ReactOS a hobby project? What is its goal?
Is it
intended to grow into something companies would use and where the
ReactOS Foundation could provide paid support for? I don't see this
happening right now.
For the time being I'll suspend most of my work on ReactOS. I'll
only
continue work on the installer project, partially because I can't
let
down the guys who work for me and partially because it's a generic
enough installer that it could work for any other OS.
Maya
gedmurphy wrote:
Problem is that most people have a real life too and need to pay the
bills at the month's end from something. As Ged said, this is a spare
time and hobby project right now and it will be as long as you
can't pay
your food and bills from working on it. ROS is a really great project
and I will never leave it for sure, like most here won't , but noone
wants to become unemployed to be able to code way more on it. We
already
had some talk with commercial supporters who might fix this in the
future and make paid devs possible, but sadly not yet.
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Maya Posch wrote:
> I don't know how the Windows internals work or even
> look like, this is my first time I'm working with them.
>
Then you're falling at the first hurdle. You can't work on ReactOS,
especially at the level you are, without knowing Windows Internals
religiously.
You need to take a step back, put some time into learning the
architecture
_and_ how to program for the architecture. Only when you know
this will
you
be in a position to write good code.
Stefan is an excellent example of this in practice. He came to
ReactOS
knowing little about NT. He put in the time and effort and
learned the
architecture (very quickly). He's now in a position read and
understand
the
kernel and is making some valuable contributions.
> If those people do not want to write documentation, fine, have
> someone
> else write the specifications and feed them those. Don't put
> them in
> charge as they clearly aren't thinking about the wellbeing of the
> project as a whole but only their small island.
>
Who? Who is going to write this documentation? Can you recommend
anyone?
Anyone with the knowledge to write it is more interested in coding.
Are you volunteering, or do you want to pay someone to do it?
> Impractical, insufficient and cop-out are words that come to mind.
> Sorry if I sound harsh, but this is among one of my many pet
> peeves ^_^
>
I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though people
_hate_
this
answer...
A good programmer, with knowledge of NT doesn't need text.
The design is already established, read Windows Internals 4th.
The code
is
the fine, granular documentation.
As much as this may annoy you, there is absolutely no way to
change this
at
the moment.
This is open source....
It's not a great business model, but it's fun :)
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5811
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28 comments
12 participants
participants (12)
-
Aleksey Bragin -
Alex Ionescu -
Alexandru Lovin -
Daniel Reimer -
gedmurphy -
Kamil Hornícek -
Marc Piulachs -
Marcin Dalecki -
Maya Posch -
Steven Edwards -
Timo Kreuzer -
Zachary Gorden