The ReactOS team wants your money

The ReactOS Foundation has recently announced its 2012 fundraising campaing: the team that wants to create a free and alternative operating system that is “binary compatible” with the Windows XP and Windows 2003 environments and is seeking money to speed up the OS development.

ReactOS is now almost ready to transit from the “alpha” stage into the “beta” phase of its development, the Foundation explains, but work on its several parts (kernel, GUI, APIs and so on) is slowed down by the fact that the main developers still have a daily work and “real life obligations” to meet outside of the project.

Maybe inspired by all this Kickstarter-driven donation frenzy going on lately, the ReactOS Foundation has decided to devote its 2012 fundraising campaign to something different and “grander” compared to the previous years’ campaigns: collect money to “formally hire as many core developers as possible”, so that they will be able to “transform a hobby into a job so they can dedicate all of their time to the ReactOS project”.

While the previous fundraising efforts led to setting up and constant refining of an “industry-grade infrastructure” for ReactOS development, this time the Foundation will try to speedup things and “make ReactOS into a true competitor and alternative for computer users worldwide”.

At the time of writing, the fundraising campaign has just begun with 729 of the projected 30,000 dollars collected overall: the ReactOS Foundation accepts donations via PayPal (USD or EUR), Flattr, wire transfer or even BitCoin.