> Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation?

I have a position on this: Sure, why not?

I do understand how at this point in time, this seems like a waste, at least if you consider intellectual curiosity a "waste". Hell, I kind of agree: right now, there's not too much coming out of ReactOS that's actually terribly useful. It's mostly a curiosity to me, and I'm sure to many developers it is a fun hobby. They do actually work on a lot of cool things after all.

However... we may be in an interesting transition right now. For the longest time, desktop computers were moving very fast. In this period of time, big corporations like Microsoft were often able to strike first and deliver sooner than smaller companies and hobbyists could've ever hoped to. XML, UNICODE, you name it, Microsoft was aiming to go to market earlier (and then sometimes, stagnate for a while...) And during this time, desktop computers and the software on them evolved fast.

At some point, we have to admit that things have changed forever. Desktop operating system design has effectively stopped moving. The biggest changes being made to desktop OSes today is just trying to mold them to be more like mobile operating systems. Instead of investing in new OS research, trying new ideas for capabilities and permissions, and giving users more control, desktop operating systems are patching around their security problems with giant bandages and strapping on app stores. Apple and Microsoft have a financial incentive to not give a shit about desktop operating system design: I think the majority of the benefit that can be gotten out of improved OS design has already been realized. The PC market will continue to grow at a glacial pace for a while, but it's not enough for anyone to really pour huge amounts of investment into, considering there's more growth and money to be made in other places.

Because of this slowdown, a target like Windows Server 2003 isn't as bad as it seems. Consider the following: Windows 3.11 was released in 1993, 10 years before Windows Server 2003. And you can absolutely tell that the difference between Windows 3.11 and Windows Server 2003 is factors greater than the difference between Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8. Don't get me wrong: they clearly made many improvements under the hood, refreshed the UI (uhhh... mostly, anyway) and added boat loads of new features. But, Windows Server 2003 is still a quite modern operating system for what it is.

Also, while ReactOS targets Server 2003 for compatibility, that doesn't mean they limit themselves to what Server 2003 can do. Obviously: it ships with a btrfs driver and package manager.

If it takes ReactOS 20+ years to catch up to what Server 2003 could do, I don't think it would be considered "useless". A fully-patched but reasonably modern and stable system that is compatible with Windows 2003 would be a godsend today. Because why not? There's nothing really wrong with this target. And once they're up to that point, they could always just simply keep going. Nothing says they have to stop at 2003.

And also, that's kind of the thing about open source. I think open source is bad at cutting edge, but it's good at "slow burn" stuff. Because once you've done the hard work of actually producing something useful, it will exist in perpetuity. It'd be hard for a company to just maintain something like ReactOS for years without any certainty of an eventual payoff, but a bunch of open source contributors mostly doing it on the side can pretty much do it as long as they feel like doing it. Traditionally, I think that this has been overlooked in part because programming practices, computers, and software used to move a lot faster, and because of this, code tended to "rot" pretty fast. Maybe there's still some room for that, but actually, I think that's also slowing down quite a lot, even with a lot of newer experimental programming languages with novel features and design, and even with the C++ language continuing to move fairly fast. Programming tools are improving rapidly in some regards, but the changing practices of programming do appear to be slowing down a little in general.

So the way I see it, all this work will accumulate and compound into something meaningful if it is to continue for a long time. As a hobby project to satisfy some intellectual curiosity, it's great. Will it ever be "useful"? It's certainly open for debate, but I think the odds are actually surprisingly tilted in its favor.