I wish ReactOS was already ready it's been damn 20 years

Maybe if they got current Windows devs to leave MS and help them

For those not in the know, ReactOS is straight up reverse engineered Windows in open source. You can download it free and it can run programs that run in Windows

It's not even close to beta

@plsburydoughboy Yeah, it's a shame more people don't know about it. Can't wait until it becomes more mature.

@djDarkX it can't be helped you can't use it yet

while builds are publicly available many programs don't work

@plsburydoughboy Yeah, I tried it out a couple times over the last few years it's been in development and it's still very much a WIP, but shows promise.
@plsburydoughboy people first started getting excited about it when I was still in university, going on 15 years back now
@theoutrider they didn't get the hail mary genius dev or ex Microsoft hire that they needed :(
@plsburydoughboy also I'm pretty sure any Microsoft employees who left and worked on React (or Wine, for that matter) instead would probably open themselves up to litigation for leaking company secrets
@theoutrider only if they demonstrably stole tech like that Carmack suit is about. Tech companies can't stop devs from bringing what they learned elsewhere, which is why the elder Steve Jobs was so keen on blackmailing competitors and blacklisting former employees
@plsburydoughboy I'm not sure, I seem to recall the heavy focus on "clean room" reverse engineering in projects like React is because if an MS kernel dev went and reimplemented functions they wrote at MS that would be infringing on MS' copyright on the Windows source code (because it's not "independent invention")
@plsburydoughboy think it has to be a 'clean-room' implementation for legal reasons, so they'd only be able to help in an advisory capacity (afaik afaik)