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ReactOS™ Version 0.4.15
Updated 23 March 2025
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1. What is ReactOS?
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ReactOS™ is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is
compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft® Windows™ NT
family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7).

More information is available at: https://reactos.org


2. Relationship with the WINE project
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ReactOS has always intended to work with the WINE project to share as much
programming effort as possible. This mainly concerns User Mode DLLs and
still happens to a degree today. Other areas of cooperation lie in
applications and testing suites.


3. Future compatibility
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The ReactOS project, although currently focused on Windows Server 2003
compatibility, is always keeping an eye toward compatibility with
Windows Vista and future Windows NT releases.


4. Supporting other System Applications
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The Windows NT architecture allows for subsystems, as does the ReactOS
architecture. A subsystem is an implementation of the APIs of another
operating system, allowing ReactOS to run applications from other systems.
We are already looking at subsystems for: Java, OS/2, and DOS and possibly
others in the future.


5. Is ReactOS legal?
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Yes we are.
All the code of ReactOS has been written from scratch by our developers.
We go to great lengths to ensure that the code our developers create is clean,
same applies to the variety of methods we use to understand Windows internals,
including clean room reverse engineering, using existing documentation freely
available both in books and on the web, using extensive tests (tens of millions)
which apply black box engineering methods against both public and private APIs
exposed by the operating system.


6. Tutorials
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Developer and User Tutorials: https://reactos.org/wiki

The tutorials contain more information on the project, compiling and testing
ReactOS - amongst other topics. Contributors to the project are always welcome.


7. Frequently Asked Questions
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Some of your questions may be answered in: https://reactos.org/faq
In addition, the ReactOS forum: https://reactos.org/forum
may contain complementary, yet non-official, information.


8. Authors
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This document was originally written by Jason Filby (jasonfilby@yahoo.com)
and is now occasionally updated by various contributors.
