For a more diverse OS world

The current state of the OS world is hopeless, there is basically no competition and no one can just jump in and hope of acquiring any major market share. The choices are limited, and all what you get is more of the same (I'm referring to Windows being the only choice on most hardware), one OS is dominating and has been for nearly 20 years.

We've got:
Windows @ 91.46%
Mac OS @ 7.57%
GNU/Linux @ 0.67%
Solaris @ 0.01%
Other @ 0.29%

This is the problem or the symptom, depending on how you look at it. This all can be attributed to Windows dominance, now instead of pointing fingers and accusing Microsoft of being evil, I want to point it the problem and how this mess came to be, never in history, a single vendor controlled so much.

A brief history:
Blame it on IBM, IBM is responsible for the mess we are in. When the IBM PC came to be, the alternatives were few, everyone sold you their software with their hardware (as Apple continues to do today) and UNIX wasn't a player in the desktop world, it was huge and only ran on minicomputers or expensive workstations (compared to the average personal computer) from companies like Sun.
So what did IBM do exactly?
1) Built its PC from off the shelf components (making cloning them feasible).
2) Opened up the platform, allowing clone vendors to appear.
3) Had Microsoft design the OS for the IBM PC and allowed them to sell it to competitors.

The IBM PC and clones dominated, so did MS-DOS and so did Windows. The IBM PC business model eventually lead to:
1) IBM exiting the PC market it created, the business model that lead to the dominance of the PC clones also lead to IBM losing against the cheaper clones and custom built PCs.
2) The closed business model basically failed and all companies using this business model either exited the market or opened up their platform, except for Apple.

So, you might be asking, is there a solution to this problem?
Some suggest that Apple open up its hardware and allow installing OS X on PCs. That's a ridiculous suggestion, half of the Mac experience is in the precision engineered hardware, like the iMac and MacBook Air.
Apple is a hardware company after all.

What about the FLOSS alternatives like GNU/Linux and *BSD?
Varies by distribution. Some of them are almost ready for desktop use, others aren't. Discussing them alone, and why they aren't ready yet, will be left for a future blog entry.

So, what is the solution?
Wine and ReactOS.
Most people aren't willing to make the switch due to software compatibility, a lot of people need their Windows software, others aren't due to familiarity with the Windows OS. Wine and ReactOS tackle these problems.
Wine now runs a lot of Windows programs out of the box, more with various degrees of tweaking and others don't run at all, but considering Wine's fast progress, the list of supported apps increases with every release.

What about ReactOS?
From ReactOS website:

ReactOS® is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.

ReactOS is the most complete working model of a Windows® like operating system available. Consequently, working programmers will learn a great deal by studying ReactOS source code and even participating in ReactOS development.

ReactOS has and will continue to incorporating features from newer versions and sometimes even define the state of the art in operating system technology.

In short, ReactOS is aiming to run your applications and use your hardware, a free operating system for everyone!

Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.4 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature complete and is not recommended for everyday use.

It will be a long wait for us who are looking for a viable Windows alternative and a long wait before every seeing a more diverse OS market.