If you're a Linux fan, there's a bit of a tendency to think that Linux and open source are two ways of saying the same thing. However, plenty of FOSS projects exist that don't have anything to do with Linux, and plenty of projects originated on Linux that now are available on other systems.

Because a fair share of our readers also use one of those other operating systems, willingly or unwillingly, we thought we'd highlight here in the coming months some of the FOSS projects that fall into the above categories.

We probably all know about our BSD brethren: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and so on, but how many of us know about ReactOS? ReactOS is an open-source replacement for Windows XP/2003. Don't confuse this with something like Wine, which allows you to run Windows programs on Linux. ReactOS is a full-up replacement for Windows XP/2003.

For more information, visit www.reactos.org.