Comment by hnlmorg

Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS.

And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not.

Platforms like Linux was always a greater threat to both companies because Linux takes potential customers away from Microsoft and Apples ecosystems in ways that FOSS reimplementations do not.

But that all said, companies of that scale are inherently greedy and paranoid. So I wouldn’t be surprised to them burying those projects under a mountain of frivolous legal demands if those projects were to become as widely known as Linux.