Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.

It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users.

It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now.

On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD, etc. Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing like that ever really existed for Windows.

> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.

Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.

MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.

Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.

Not so long ago there was a leak of windows’ source code, up to xp and 2003 server… the leak was so complete there are videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!) windows from there.

And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).