The developer of Free95 says it will be a free Windows 95-compatible OS, but we suspect an elaborate prank. At best, maybe an unknowing one.
The project description of Versoft's Free95 says that "Free95 is an open source Windows-compatible operating system." Well, not yet it's not. It appears to be barely even a sketch of a demo. The real question is, perhaps, will it ever be what it claims? On this, we are inclined to listen to the advice of noted design authority Carlton D. Ridenhour.
Developer Kap Petrov announced his project on Reddit. There he has received considerable acclaim for his efforts, and at the time of writing, 330 stars on GitHub. The Adafruit blog seems impressed, and it's also been reported on Hackaday. All this for a project that doesn't even have a license yet.
We confess that we are a little surprised by how well the project is being received, in terms of uncritical news stories, positive comments, and people expressing their hope that they might be able to run Windows apps on a different OS.
After all, you can already do that, and have been able to for years now. WINE is pretty good now and can run 16-bit and 32-bit apps on 64-bit OSes, x86 apps on Arm, and more. Including AAA games. And if you want a whole Windows-compatible OS, that exists too, in the form of the now multicore-capable ReactOS.
We find it all the more surprising since there is not a lot to see except two low-quality screenshots and a relatively tiny amount of source code. We can't really judge the quality of the C code, but we can judge this less than compendious remarks file. You can judge the open source credentials of dllme.txt for yourself. There was also a file called malware.c, but it's been removed, which is probably for the best.
Some other forums are slightly less charitable, but still, not to the degree that you might expect. For instance, from Hacker News…
Asveikau:
Sorry this is going to be more impolite than most HN comments, but this person doesn't know what they're doing.
[…]
This is not what a replacement Windows kernel looks like.
Honestly, that seems very polite to us. The denizens of Slashdot are a little more skeptical. Among our favorite assessments so far are:
Sosume:
It runs only a dos box and notepad, but the developer pinky promises to keep up the work!
Blugalf:
With all due respect to anyone's efforts, but this is as far removed from being a "New Open Source Windows-Compatible Operating System" as a firecracker taped to a wooden stick is from a Falcon 9.
It has taken ReactOS nearly 30 years to get where it is now. The project launched in 1996, under the almost suspiciously similar name of the FreeWin95 project. Trying to reproduce Windows NT is a vast undertaking and we remain concerned that if it ever gets to the point where it's genuinely competitive, even with an elderly version of Windows – such as what we consider the classic version, Windows 2000 – then the full legal wrath of Redmond will descend on it, leaving nothing but a smoking crater.
Just to be clear, we're not saying Free95 is no good, or doomed to failure, or anything like that. We're not questioning its author's abilities. What we are questioning is whether Free95 is in fact an attempt to write an OS at all. We suspect that it started out as a joke, maybe the sort of thing that we gather is now called vibe coding – just freewheeling with an LLM bot coding assistant, improvising, and seeing how far one can get and still have the thing compile successfully, never mind actually do anything useful. But what may have been a bit of fun has gotten rather out of hand and is still rapidly snowballing.
Of course, Petrov could just drop it and move on. He's left comments on Reddit saying that he has a local copy of a version 0.2.1 but he hasn't uploaded it yet – which is not the way that Git works for version control, but is hardly important.
It has just surprised us how many people seem to be unquestioningly accepting this, without stopping to ask if it's real, or if it's been done before, or, indeed, asking much at all.
We will leave the last word to another Slashdot commenter.
Laughingskeptic:
Out of the 400+ functions listed by Microsoft for WinUser.h he has 2 implemented: FillRect, PtInRect. It is a little premature to be discussing releases and how lightweight this implementation is.
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