On 12/31/2014 1:48 PM, Jim Hall wrote:
FreeDOS-32 has been around a long time (since 2000) but they haven't
released anything to date. I was in occasional email contact with one
or two of the developers at the time, and I know they suffered poor
project stability. They completely started over more than once. They
decided to create their own filesystem (LEAN) which I still believe
was a mistake. They threw out a lot of code and re-wrote from scratch.
The FreeDOS-32 project went idle in 2005 without having ever released
a version of their kernel to try out. So I've never tried it. Looking
at their "explore" list on their front page, I've always known
FreeDOS-32 was VERY unfinished.
But the concept of a 32-bit FreeDOS kernel was interesting. Their
goals were lofty, but sometimes you need lofty goals to do something
new. It was an interesting project to watch.
So I am interested today to see if this kickstarter project can take
up the FreeDOS-32 code base and make something of it. But I'm
cautious. As they make progress, I will watch for application
compatibility, because *APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY IS 100% IMPORTANT*.
What I don't want to see is someone create a "FreeDOS-32" that's
basically a custom operating system kernel that does something
completely different from "DOS" and provides a compatibility "shell"
to run classic DOS apps. Because we have that now. It's called Linux +
DOSEMU to run DOS programs. I do that all the time today. And I like
it, but I don't fool myself into thinking "Linux + DOSEMU is still
DOS" because it isn't.
FreeDOS-32 was born dead IMHO. You simply can't not do what they had in
mind and still be "100% application compatible". That's why they had to
start over and over again, without really getting anywhere.
And you won't find anyone writing any new software for it that fills all
the needs & purposes of (still) existing 16bit DOS software. Any such
effort is better spend on producing user applications for Linux.
And that $2500 Kickstarter goal won't buy you even one month of
developer time. And one has to be smoking some really bad stuff to think
that such a project could be done in such short period of time anyway...
Ralf
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