Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#2ReactOS, 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.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#3Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#4Riak
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#5[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#6ReactOS, 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, beca…
Wine, Proton and virtualization all got good enough that there's no need for a half-baked binary-compatible Windows reimplementation, and I think that took a lot of the oxygen out of what could have been energy towards ReactOS. It's a cool concept but not really a thing anybody requires.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#7Google Glass. Thanks society.
People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#8Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#9Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013
but
Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#10Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.
Are you referring to the SWF file format?