Microsoft definitely know about ReactOS.

not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.

▲

hnlmorg 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS.

And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not.

Platforms like Linux was always a greater threat to both companies because Linux takes potential customers away from Microsoft and Apples ecosystems in ways that FOSS reimplementations do not.

But that all said, companies of that scale are inherently greedy and paranoid. So I wouldn’t be surprised to them burying those projects under a mountain of frivolous legal demands if those projects were to become as widely known as Linux.

▲

qubex 14 hours ago | parent [-]

You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008. Apple still sells or provides subscriptions to a lot of software (Final Cut Pro, Logic, et cetera) and back in the day I paid a lot of money for some of their more niche offerings Xsan, for example, which I remember cost me an eye-watering thousand bucks per node. Xgrid on the other hand was free, and it’s extremely unfortunate they killed it because in this day and age of Thunderbolt-interconnected Mac Studios with unified memory architectures running AI workloads “here’s a bunch of Macs regard them as a unified computing resource” would be extremely useful (but I digress from the digression).

	▲	hnlmorg 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Logic, Final Cut, Xcode etc aren’t really the same thing because they’re applications rather than the OS (which we were talking about). But i didn’t realise Apple used to charge for OS upgrades. So thanks for the correction there.