You would, if there were any takers. I'm not one of them. x86 was open this far and will be open IMO from now on. That's what pushed Intel forward, nice docs and heavy developer support. It's also what pushed ATI forward.

Remember SLI being the top dog? People bought nwhatitsname chipsets like nuts, even though they made the worse chips ever. You needed 2 nVIDIAs, a nSomething board, some drivers and (initially) a dongle of sorts. Specs were closed and only nVIDIA made the boards. Profitville!

ATI devised Crossfire (X) and opened the specs to the planet. Any Joe could build a board that supported it, moreover, the extended configuration doesn't even care what the chipset is. ATI, a division of AMD, opened specs to Intel. Now Intel makes the boards, we buy. Guess who's swimming in cash. (If you said Intel you get credit too).

Right now, PC/x86 architecture is the major platform because it's extensible and anyone can make any hardware for anything they want. I don't think anyone is that nuts as to strangle it.

I've been an Intel faithful client for many, many years, after Cyrix died. But if the idiots restrict my OS I'm jumping to AMD in 48 hours. I hear they overclock really well.

Intel doesn't care who wins as long as someone does.

They may make locked an unlocked chips and charge for the premium. In the end, you'd have N900 and N900 unlocked, for a little more, as is the case with provider lock on phones now. No more.

If they are all locked, they limit purchases, because I might just not buy an N900 if I can't have Windows on it, and maybe you might just not buy it if it has no Linux. So, really, it's more profitable to make a flexible device than to lock it.

I have no doubt there's going to be nutcases like the fruit people. I doubt they'll ever win. If Nokia locks it, I'm switching the next day at 8 AM.

They always throw tacks behind them as a matter of course. But the point that ReactOS makes is that they can't throw tacks in the past. Once it's out there, it's out there. It takes time and effort to build an OS by clean room and specs, but MS can't really do much in a legal sense, and they can't back-revoke the documentation.

The only way for them to tack it is to keep pushing the envelope and make the next OS so much better that the old one will seem old. That will keep ROS back for a long time.

What I first started using ROS, it was an NT4 project. Then they moved to 2000, and now they have an XP/2003 target.

XP is 2002-2003 technology. ROS is behind, but XP is still popular, flexible, stable (with proper care) and widely used. It has the biggest ever driver base, and, as a platform, can be extended by 3rd party just as well as the original.

It will be a long time before ROS will be Windows 7. I know that. Do I think 300E for W7 is worth the luxury? Well, I do, because I bought one for my baby. I can't have water pipes and crossfire and go around with a stolen OS. But for other applications, heck yeah.

Indeed. And cheap old technology is always going to be a contender on the market. All really cool corporations still have a few 300 MHz PCs somewhere. They all have some Linux somewhere for a PC that does nothing but act as a router, or an internal HTTP, or a SMB, and simply doesn't justify price. Joking aside, no matter what you do, there's always going to be a terminal just barely worth the hardware, the occasional daemon, etc. These could go well with a simpler, older OS that just works.

And as soon as ROS is going to be close to XP, it's going to be a viable alternative.

NT4 still runs on a ton of machines, servers nobody dares touch, workstations, ATMs, etc. And if the darned thing still had a decent driver base it'd still be used.

I have no problem with a cheap router that is now designated a Linux machine actually running an OS I can administrate with zero effort. Plus, less gadgetry and less eye candy makes for a slimmer, faster OS. It's the best of both worlds.