FreeDOS Founder Jim Hall: After 30 Years, What I've Learned About Open Source Community (opensource.net) 39
In 1994, college student Jim Hall created FreeDOS (in response to Microsoft's plan to gradually phase out MS-DOS). After celebrating its 30th anniversary last week, Hill wrote a new article Saturday for OpenSource.net: "What I've learned about Open Source community over 30 years."
Lessons include "every Open Source project needs a website," but also "consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project." ("In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.")
But the larger lesson is that "Open Source projects must be grounded in community." Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber...
Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general "Help me" questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel.
The last of its seven points stresses that "An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share" (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that "It's more than just code," and Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to "the great developers and users in our community." In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project... Here's looking forward to more years to come!
Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can."
As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary.
And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...
Lessons include "every Open Source project needs a website," but also "consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project." ("In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.")
But the larger lesson is that "Open Source projects must be grounded in community." Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber...
Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general "Help me" questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel.
The last of its seven points stresses that "An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share" (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that "It's more than just code," and Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to "the great developers and users in our community." In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project... Here's looking forward to more years to come!
Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can."
As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary.
And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...
FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, FreeDOS has been a wonderful item. These days, it is one of the few ways to run the old MS-DOS games effectively without chasing down old software or worrying about license issues, as MS (as far as I know) doesn't sell MS-DOS anymore. So, if one wants to play an old Wizardry, Doom, or Commander Keen, FreeDOS is what keeps those games alive.
Kudos on Jim Hall for keeping this project going for so long.
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly the best way to run DOS games is with 86Box. It emulates old machine precisely, down to the cycle. Modern hardware tends not to be that compatible and many old games run too fast or have issues with graphical tricks that only worked on old CGA cards etc. It emulate a large number of peripherals too, and again modern systems are unlikely to support things like Soundblaster and AdLib audio.
You can even run Windows and early 3D games that needed cards like the Voodoo series with it, but support goes all the way back to the original IBM PC with 16k of RAM.
I'm not trying to detract from FreeDOS here, it's just that it is not designed for playing old games. It's designed to let DOS apps run natively on relatively modern hardware.
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeDOS is an excellent companion to 86box if you're not a purist and want the genuine DOS 3.3 experience.
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Informative)
86Box is a direct descendant of PCEM and both work extremely well for this purpose, although 86box seems a bit more polished and advanced. 86Box isn't an emulator but instead a byte for byte reproduction of the actual CPU, supporting hardware, and BIOS. It's amazing that you can plug in different video cards, sound cards, etc.. simply by choosing them from a drop down list. Get VooDoo3 support without having to track down (and paying hefty for) an actual VooDoo3 card. FreeDOS has it's place too, in my opinion, on real 386 to Pentium 233MMX class machines because it can take advantage of the 32bit hardware in them.
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Arguments about whether FreeDOS is better than DOSBox or whatever miss the point, I think.
It does not need to have a use beyond personal satisfaction. If no-one but Jim wanted FreeDOS, it would not still be going so strong. There are always new projects cropping up on the FreeDOS website, and updates to old projects. And it both informs and is informed by DOSBox and other projects. Choice is a wonderful thing.
Yes, Intel is going to eventually strip out the legacy stuff that lets FreeDOS talk to newer hardwa
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you absolutely want to run it on old hardware.
Dosbox Staging does things much better - and no need to fiddle with DOS memory management. Heck, it even emulates CGA composite. And if you can find the ROMs, Roland MT-32 too (must for e.g. Wing Commander).
https://www.dosbox-staging.org... [dosbox-staging.org]
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically, another place where FreeDOS is useful is flashing firmware. For example, cross-flashing Broadcom RAID cards from IR mode to IT mode so it just presents the drives as JBOD. Similar with firmware on some PCs. It works well for this.
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Nice thread about the various options available!
HBA (Score:2)
Yeah the flasher for switching my Dell HBA to JBOD mode was a USB boot image that ran FreeDOS.
Re:FreeDOS has been a wonderful item... (Score:4, Informative)
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Ironically, another place where FreeDOS is useful is flashing firmware.
I'm curious, do you have modern hardware which has this use case? Sure I remember flashing BIOS and RAID cards from a DOS memory stick back 2+ decades ago. But all hardware I have seen this century either has a flashing system built right into its own code (e.g. UEFI motherboards) or expose some kind of interface that is accessible via a windows / linux drivers (SMBus, or otherwise).
Do devices still exist that expect you to reboot into DOS, and do they actually function in a world where SecureBoot makes tha
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There is no open source community (Score:3, Insightful)
There's just a whole load of people involved some way in free software whether its creating it and/or using it and there are many different motivations. A community implies a whole lot of people ultimately striving for the same goal but that doesn't apply here because of the diametrically opposed viewpoints of large numbers of them. eg certain people see writing OSS as some kind of benevolent calling, others see them as mugs, just want to get free stuff and contribute nothing.
Wonder how long it will continue to work (Score:3)
Re:Wonder how long it will continue to work (Score:4)
I think as long as x86 CPUs exist some form of DOS will will also exist, those two things are historically tied together. ARM has it's roots much closer to Linux as they kinda grew up together.
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Re:Wonder how long it will continue to work (Score:4)
ARM predates Linux by a long ways. ARM is at least as old as x86 (goes back to the late 70s), and its development had nothing to do with Linux at all, and really still doesn't.
And in actual fact, due to the fragmented nature of ARM implementations and the lack of adoption of platform standards by the SoC vendors, Linux support for ARM actually is quite bad compared to x86, at least from an end user's point of view.
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Sure I meant that they rose in popularity around the same time, not that they have the historical connection that DOS and x86 do.
When people think of ARM they think phones, tablets, Raspberry Pi's, stuff like that. All domains dominated with Linux/Unix, not the stuff we associate with x86. Or rather we don't associate Microsoft with ARM as much as they are trying.
Re:Wonder how long it will continue to work (Score:4, Informative)
ARM is at least as old as x86 (goes back to the late 70s)
Nope, ARM was introduced in 1985 [wikipedia.org]. It was initially available as an extension to the Acorn BBC Micro.
The first computer with an ARM CPU was the Acorn Archimedes [wikipedia.org] in 1987. It ran the Arthur 0.2 (in EEPROM) operating system in 1987 and Arthur 1.2 (in ROM) in 1988, which was then renamed to RISC OS 2 [wikipedia.org] in 1989 (because there was an Arthur 2 movie [wikipedia.org] released in 1988 and Acorn did not want to be associated to that).
its development had nothing to do with Linux at all
This is correct, Linux was developed on 80386 in 1991.
Re:Wonder how long it will continue to work (Score:4)
If we're talking the classic MS-DOS experience on a PC that most people mean when they're talking about DOS on PCs, there's more to it than just x86. It's also the whole legacy of "IBM PC Compatible" from the BIOS to the memory map to the way it interacts with peripherals and the applications it can run. After all, there were a handful of non-IBM PC Comptaible MS-DOS machines that, while they ran DOS, wouldn't run the same things.
Really there's two different use cases for something like FreeDOS - running legacy code and using it as a minimal environment for things like firmware flashers and such. There's nothing keeping FreeDOS from keeping up to date with the times and continuing to boot on the latest and greatest 64-bit only, EFI only machines and staying in its niche as a minimal OS for specialized/embedded use cases. On the other hand, running legacy code will need all that compatibility stuff to still be around - x86_64 CPUs that still support Real Mode, legacy BIOS compatibility modes, various memory map and interface setups that date back to the beginning, etc. FreeDOS updated to run on an entirely different x86_64 arch that doesn't actually run anything legacy is not really any different to, say, porting it to ARM or RISC-V or whatever since functionally it's basically completely different anyway. I would expect heavier-weight OSes to have compatibility layers and handlers within its HAL for most stuff, but for low level bare metal OSes like DOS that sort of defeats the purpose of a slim, direct OS like it's aiming to be.
X86 (Score:5, Informative)
Intel is, just now, rolling out a plan to remove all the legacy stuff out of the x86 infrastructure, essentially only supporting amd64. They are just now working on the roadmap, actual implementation will take years. So flat 16-bit addressing is going to be around for a while yet.
Real-mode isn't flat (Score:2)
The 8086 didn't have flat 16-bit addressing. It had segmented 20-bit addressing. If you want flat 16-bit addressing, you need to go back to the previous generation of chips, like the 8080 enhanced derivatives (e.g. 8085 and Z80).
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> FreeDOS still doesn't support Windows 3.1/3.11
Does anyone know what the technical reasons are? Not emulating a DPMI?
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FreeDOS still doesn't support Windows 3.1/3.11
FreeDOS got Windows 3.1 support last year. It doesn't support everything, but it will run.
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Chainloading a SeaBios/ARM64 from the RPi bootloader shouldn't be that hard to get 64 bit FreeDOS on a Raspberry Pi 5.
Running actual peripherals such as floppy drives and parallel ports would actually be easier than a modern PC that has long since removed those legacy connectors - via that 40 pin GPIO header for all sorts of newfangled legacy gear off Aliexpress.
Of course none of your legacy x86 binaries would work - you'd still need a Prism/WOW64 style layer to thunk 16bit x86 instructions but isn't that w
He hasn't got an unkept beard (Score:4, Insightful)
So the project will fail sooner or later.
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Re:He hasn't got an unkept beard (Score:4)
Note: "Unkept" is a very generic term, only some dictionaries even acknowledge it can be applied to people, and then only in British English. When talking about hair, beards, and people's appearances it's far more common to say "unkempt".
To Jim Hall (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if you'll read this, but if you do, thanks a lot for your work!
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My favorite feature is how much it pisses off neophiles.
Hehehe. Mine is how well it runs everything I've thrown at it, including my old code from the late 80s.
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More like you chased them away for constantly thinking about their peepee
Thank You Jim Hall (Score:2)
I've quite enjoyed this project over the years and remember reading all the Slashdot articles regarding this project as they came in.