Thomas Mueller wrote: > > Congratulations on both your more lucrative occupation (webhosting) and > decision to make Arachne into open-source project. We certainly can't blame > you for favoring something that makes more money than Arachne.
It doesn't really make money, but it is steady income without need to pretend that I am programming genius ;) (which I never was...) > I've been saying for some time that for Arachne to be viable, it needs the > efforts of the open-source community, and I might say that about Net-Tamer too. > David Colston of Net-Tamer, are you reading this? Arachne could be developed > not only for DOS but for Linux and other open-source Unixes too. Arachne and Net-Tamer has almost nothing in common. Arachne was trying to take advantage of as many existing standards in DOS as possible, and to port as many new standards, as possible. I failed to support various resident TCP/IP stacks - but they have never become standards anyway... Nettamer was minimalistic application, never intended to be portable to anything but the minimal DOS based PC.... > DOS Internet community is not so strong that they can afford to be isolated and > compete against each other. They need to be united. There is plenty of > stronger competition from Linux and Mac, not to mention MS-Windows. ;-) DOS Internet community can learn only from Linux community - and learn to share as much as possible (as people who do DJGPP, Allegro, etc. already do). It is not just Linux community - it is open source community, and it includes many operating systems, including FreeDOS. The trouble of DOS is, that all programmers with enough skills to port open source code to DOS will soon learn, that using directly Linux is simply easier and more fun... :-) Semi-commercial shareware development of DOS versions of multi-platform software may be some kind of solution - this is my plan. But at least you should understand, that developing anything on DOS platform is hell. The greatest games for 8-bit computers (ZX Spectrum...) were also not developed on ZX Spectrum, etc. - they were developed on emulators running on early PCs, because it was superior development platform these days...
