Reverse engineering

Why is it so hard to reverse engineer Windows and be like "I have an open source Windows clone that can handle everything Windows can but its mine and I can do whatever I want with it because I've changed enough code for it to be different and added some more features"?  It shouldn't be all that hard.

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

It's not hard at all, actually.  Just time consuming and illegal.  DMCA and all.  Your ass would be in jail in nothing flat.

And ReactOS isn't reverse engineered per se, it and Wine (which is used in ReactOS) are a reimplementation of the publically available APIs.  The only reason it wasn't completed YEARS ago is that Microsoft refuses to cooperate:  shitty, misleading and missing documentation, active attempts at sabotage, etc, etc, etc.

>>2
ReactOS is basically Wine with its own shell.

No. ReactOS is its own operating system that shares lots of code with Wine.

>>5
They share no code, if they do, it's strictly ReactOS taking code from Wine.

>>6
Way to fanboy, blindfag.

>>6
Wine is an implementation of the Microsoft Windows win32 aplication programming interface. The ReactOS project has it's own kernel and some lower level operating system functionality without any Wine code. Together with the Wine code, it provides an incomplete clone of the Microsoft Windows operating environment.