At 06:28 PM 6/29/2006 -0500, Jim Hall wrote: <snip> >I don't _really_ think FreeDOS is dead. But we have stalled. There >hasn't been any new development with FreeDOS in a long time. The last >news item on the web site was posted 8 June, but the last FreeDOS news >item dates back to 16 May and 11 January. Honestly, our lack of >progress means I've started to lose interest. After 12 years, there's >also been lots of bickering on the project, and I kind of got tired >dealing with it all. Recently, we've had some flame wars which seems to >have taken up all the bandwidth from people working on FreeDOS. IMHO I >don't think it's going anywhere. I'd love for someone to pick up >FreeDOS and keep it going, but I don't think it will be me. I'll still >continue to register the freedos.org domain, and I'll keep it current. >That's the least I can do. > >I guess I sort of "snapped" when I sat down on 28 June and was about to >write up a "Happy Birthday to FreeDOS" news item, talking about how far >we've come, and how great it will be when FreeDOS "1.0" is released.
No, I'm sorry, this explanation doesn't quite do it to me. You are the sole owner of the FreeDOS name. You can declare version 1.0, or 2.0.5 or 3.gizmo.woofdaddy at any time -- 1.0 release status doesn't and never did need a committee. Just do it, give everybody on development a month's notice and roll out what's there. FreeDOS certainly works good enough for 1.0 release. In fact, I think it's worked well enough for a while. "Bugfree" won't ever happen. I am certain that either Bernd or Blair would make the final 1.0 fileset for you to announce to the world. And if I'm wrong, heck, for guaranteed 1.0 release I'd do it myself. As far as the recent prolonged flame-wars, most have spun up out of Johnson Lam's misbehavior on the list, between being a one-way conduit of abuse and pushing his personally preferred non-open-source products like he was on sales commission. You could have -- and I would argue in your capacity as an administrator you should have -- warned and then shut off his access to the list until he was ready to act like a minimally responsible poster. You would have heard cries of censorship of course, one always does in those situations, but it would have stopped the nonsense cold. You might even have warned a few others, myself included, about publicly defending ourselves and FreeDOS development too loudly, vigorously, or profanely against attack. And, frankly, however unpleasant, taking those actions is in your job description. Nobody else can do it. If I don't sound terribly sympathetic, well, I'm afraid it is because I'm not. It isn't because your web joke was stupid; my own scrapbook of stupidity has much worse. It's because it is past time for you stop observing how things here have degenerated, and to instead take the initiative to step forward and declare FreeDOS 1.0-ready. I'd sure like to see it, because even though I've invested only a small fraction of the time in FreeDOS that you have, and a number of others here (and elsewhere) have, it's still enough effort that I'd like to see it get out there and go. Up to you. Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
