[PLUG] ReactOS site down again...

[Michael C. Robinson]

I found an interview via WineHQ with a fellow who worked on ReactOS back
in 2004.  No doubt, he really thought that 6 months would see ReactOS in
much better shape than it is in even today.  The ReactOS community of
today seems like a very angry community that is experiencing an ever
lengthening timeline for getting something stable/quasi stable put
together.

Perhaps it would be best to fix whatever problems remain in Linux and
really push Linux instead.  For instance, does everyone need X Windows?
I look at the philosophy behind Syllable and wonder if a simpler GUI 
on top of Linux would be a more reasonable idea?

ReactOS, started in 1996, is still in alpha stage.  I think 0.3.11 was
released 5-6 months ago.  The site is totally down right now according
to openDNS.  Sometimes, the site seems to go down when a new release is
pending.  ReactOS needs to be in beta, but who knows how far off that
is.

When is a project, even an OSS project, not worth it?  Linux came
together in what, four years time?  ReactOS is taking much longer 
to come together.  With a third of all software projects being
completed, maybe the ReactOS community should accept that their 
project isn't one of those and either move on or hand the project 
over to someone else.

Linux is very mature, although I have problems with my AGP HD 3450
Radeon shutting off without warning and my system is oddly quite slow.
I'm trying to play Runes of Avalon Book I which supposedly requires a
1.6 Ghz processor on a 3.06 Ghz P4 1.5 gigabytes of ram Fedora 12 system
and it is still too slow.  I think it makes more sense to put pressure
on AMD and the makers of NVIDIA video cards to help the open source
community write better drivers for Linux than it does to try and clone
Windows NT.  Especially now with Linux being taken more seriously by
software producers, fixing Linux should be taken more seriously as well.

Anyways, how common is it for someone to be banned from communicating
with the people working on an open source project?  Is ReactOS a dying
project at this point or is there a realistic possibility of someone
else taking on the project and doing something great with it?

Maybe Linux should be the server and something else should be the
desktop system, but is the Windows NT environment really all that 
great a choice for desktops?

Maybe if the ReactOS community didn't make the code available free of
charge to the public, the GPL doesn't require this, programmers could
be hired to work full time.