A new OS in 4 years with 100% windows ABI compatibility. Really now. I've heard this song before from somewhere.
Remember a few years back when a little known company in the Philippines called SpecOpsLabs unveiled with much splash their baby called Project David? If you have no recollection of what it was, it's supposed to be a layer on top of Linux that will enable Linux to run Windows applications. It was met with a huge amount of criticism particularly because the Project David screen shots all indicated that it was running Wine (since it exhibited all of wine's GUI bugs). All of that and they failed to acknowledge that it was running wine. Not that it has to. But these kinds of disclosure is important if you are trying to sell your company to MS.
And now this new OS comes along. I won't be surprised that this is running on top of ReactOS or Linux + Wine. For those not in the know, ReactOS is basically a non-unix based operating system built entirely around wine. Tmax Window 9 has been met with a lot of enthusiasm from the Korean media as much as Project David has been met with a lot of enthusiasm from the Philippine media. It's not a bad thing. I have nothing against Korean programmers and a new OS is not a bad thing. But prior experience tells me that this is a lot of hot air. The wine project has been around for 16 YEARS. Really.
2 comments:
Hi roel! Did you know that my college internship days were spent doing a Windows-like file manager using Qt-C++ for Project David. I thought it was fun but the development process was such a mess. I dunno what happened after I left but I think the company died. hehe.
Isn't nautilus already doing that?
Anyway, yes, the company has probably died. Probably because of the said development practices more than bad press. The amount of negative criticism it got from the open source community was staggering at the time. Most people have forgotten about it now.
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