Now I like this one. I seriously would love to see ReactOS be successful, and I&#39;m no developer, but I can say that if we want this to be successful, then we need to take the winning features from the best of both worlds. Windows has the flexibility and user-friendliness, and Linux is free. So, put them together and you have the winning combination right?<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:37 AM, Chris Monahan <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:foreverwatcher@googlemail.com">foreverwatcher@googlemail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
ReactOS Mailing List<br><br>I&#39;m not a developer, i&#39;m just a follower of the community and enthusiast but allow me to outline why the decision to not include components that do not add to the compatibility with the Win32 platform is more than simple politics.<br>


<br>The way windows works is that it provides a solid OS that has the neccesary API&#39;s to accomodate a healthy ecosystem of third-party software. It also bends over backwards to enable such third party software to work. I feel that this emphasis on third party packages and maintaining this ecosystem is possibly the most important of Windows principles. This is not a principle of Linux, or rather the third party software ecosystem only really exists on a source code level. (I&#39;m not counting community repositories as &#39;third party&#39; I mean there are pretty much no packages that you can just download, install and run on any given linux flavour and version.) <br>


<br>That&#39;s just the way it works there; arguably it&#39;s more secure for Linux, but it lacks in many ways the flexibility of Windows. For example I cannot install the latest firefox or OpenOffice in ubuntu without potentially breaking something - instead I wait for the next release of ubuntu.<br>


<br>ReactOS attempts to provides a synthesis of the opensource values of Linux and this software flexibility of Windows.<br><br>There is a tension, however, when you look at the bigger picture. Microsoft is a principle developer for it&#39;s own platform, and will often bundle things in an &#39;integrated&#39; manner within the OS. This, in a sense, defies the third-party philosophy that should be inherent with the platform. This may be less of a problem these days as developers and users are more aware, but it&#39;s still an issue.<br>


<br>ReactOS, it seems, attempts to get rid of this tension by harshly pushing back the line between OS and third-party software - no bundling of anything that isn&#39;&#39;t neccesary to maintain that third-party ecosystem. This is not a bad thing as it allows this software flexibility to show its strength, but many who are used to the feature set of linux distros and editions of Windows are confused. It must be noted that just because ReactOS won&#39;t come with Python, or a media player, or a browser etc does not mean that they will not be available. Because of the software flexibility inherent in the platform, it will be a simple matter of downloading a package and running it.<br>


<br> There&#39;s also nothing that anyone can, or should, do to stop people distributing versions with software packages bundled or &#39;integrated&#39; a la the Reaction project. It has been said in the past that such &#39;distros&#39; would compromise reactos, creating a nightmare of mutually incompatible systems like we see in the Linux world. I counter that the nature of the platform is such that those that break compatibiltiy will neccesarily die out, and to restrict or condemn third party distros would in fact be damaging to the strength of a platform with such emphasis on third party software.<br>


<br>The decision to keep ReactOS pure has more to it than simple politics. It is a principled commitment to the purity of the platform. It, of course, could be associated with the childish anti-linux stance adopted by a minority of ReactOS community members, but they do not speak for the project as a whole and they should largely be ignored in favour of relevent criticisms and judgements about the roles of each platform.<br>
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<br clear="all">Chris Monahan<br>
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