The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.11. This release has been delayed by quite some time due to various blocker bugs which manifested each time we tried to release. A lot of time has gone into hunting down these bugs and various steps have been taken to try to ensure we don't hit this problem again.

For the last few years we've been intrigued by the progress of ReactOS, a free software Windows implementation that could one day give Microsoft the chills. Well, ReactOS 0.3.9 is now here, with major performance improvements.

While we don't normally talk much about ReactOS, the free software operating system that was started some twelve years ago to provide binary compatible with Windows NT, there is a new proposal to abandon much of its Win32 subsystem that has built up over the past decade and to create a new Windows subsystem that in large part is derived from Wine code.

The ReactOS project has seen some major progress during 2008. The project, which aims to create a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has published a 'year-in-review' article concerning 2008, detailing the various area of work. It provides some interesting insights into the project's development.

The idea of an open-source operating system that is designed to be 100% compatible with Windows XP and Windows 2000 is something new and has the potential to straddle the divide between consumer friendly and open-source. And that’s what ReactOS is aiming to do.

I've been writing about the ReactOS for at least five years (the project itself is more than 10 years old). It's an effort to try and replicate a Windows operating system in open source.

The ReactOS team has just put out its latest newsletter, and it contains some interesting information on the progress being made. However, it also provides some definitive insight into what, exactly, the project is trying to recreate - a topic of some confusion.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” is where ReactOS, what is essentially an attempt at a free Windows clone, derives its name. The project aims to be ‘binary compatible’ with Windows NT, which XP, Vista and the upcoming 7 are based on, meaning that users will be able to run native Windows applications without forking out for a licence from Microsoft...

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.