the corner office

Trawling one of my favourite geek sites - Kerneltrap.

I'm not quite sure what to make of ReactOS, an open-source NT clone. Other than when I saw mention of working with WINE, my brain clicked into Notes sans Windows mode. The project is still a bit young, but you never know...

This leads me into an introspective digression. I'm always slightly awed by folks who're willing to sit down and put this much work into a body of code for software that is in essence, dead. The site mentions OS/2 cloners, for example. Right... there are people out there cloning OS/2. Uh-huh. This work is academically interesting, I'm sure, but that's about it (unless you come up with a more extensible technology with wider use). Years of work for an audience of a few dozen, perhaps? Just how many people on this planet are really going to dish out kudos and love and fuzzy moonbeams because they want to run a shaky implementation of OS/2 for free? Ditto for NT4. By the time ReactOS is fully-functional, kids coming out of school won't have a clue what NT4/Win95 looked like. Y'know? I saw Win98 today and thought 'gee...'

Then again, I do recall somebody passing me a link back in the late 90's for a crowd of people working on an open-source Notes client implementation. I recall the project was named after another Asian flower. A quick Google doesn't shed much light. Always wondered what happened to that project...