German IT news website Heise writes that the developers of ReactOS, the free and open source Windows clone, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to advance the development of their Windows-compatible operating system. The campaign’s target is to collect $120,000 for the development of a commercial version of ReactOS called “Thorium Core”. The developers state that everything which is developed in Thorium will also be fed back into ReactOS. The Kickstarter campaign will run until 21st February and had realised over $18,000 at the time of writing.
The ReactOS project has the aim of building an open source operating system based on Windows NT architecture with a Win32 sub-system. The current development aim is compatibility with Windows NT 5.2, so that 32 bit hardware drivers and applications for Windows XP (NT 5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2) can be used. Finally, ReactOS should provide a leaner and more flexible environment for Windows applications than that provided by current versions of Windows. Nevertheless, the developers warn that the most recent version of ReactOS – 0.3.15 – is still an alpha version and advise against using it for day-to-day work.