ReactOS has been in alpha/beta since 1996 (freewin95) though if you *really* want to pick a nit I guess you can say since late 1997 when they decided to focus on NT and not 95
True. But they had a complete halt, year before last, when MS complained that they were using MS code. So they had to audit every line, and do a major rewrite. They’re back on track now, just slow going.
They desperately need money and/or more programmers.
To explain the first one in a little more detail; one of the problems we were experiencing as a project was huge system regressions at release time. Our release cycle used to be around the 6 month mark and we were finding that after 6 months of heavy development, we would branch and start to test only to find regressions had appeared all over the operating system. A list of blockers was then generated and this could take a huge amount of time to clear, at which point developers were concentrating on trying to fix regressions and development came to a halt.
We stumbled across this post from Linus Torvalds which showed the linux kernel was experiencing the same problems we were having, and discusses the changes which worked for Linux.
We opted for a similar approach of shortening the release cycle, which is keeping our main trunk much more stable and means we can virtually release trunk as is without the need for lengthy branch periods. It also means more releases from the project, which is hoped will raise awareness and interest in ReactOS.
So that should help to explain some things, also.