Blair Campbell wrote: > Why is there a horrible joke on www.freedos.org?? > FreeDOS is definitely NOT dead, and it IS close to 1.0. >
In short, not dead. Man, I did a really stupid thing with the web site. I've gotten sooooo much email on this that it's a lesson I won't soon forget. The truth of the matter is that it really _was_ a horrible joke that backfired. Here's what happened: Two weeks ago, I learned I needed to either move or shut down the server that runs (ran?) www.freedos.org. Last week, I set up a VHOST on freedos.sourceforge.net so that the SF site would respond to www.freedos.org traffic, and I had my DNS provider change the DNS entry for www.freedos.org to point to SourceForge's servers. Within a day, the DNS change had propagated so the new www.freedos.org address resolved for me at work and at home. So I assumed all was well, and I started seeing less traffic on the old server as DNS propagated to everyone else in the world. After a week, traffic on the old www.freedos.org had pretty much stopped ... or so I thought. Deciding to have a little "fun" (word used with tongue firmly in cheek) I posted a "FreeDOS is dead" message on the old site for the 1 or 2 people that were still accessing it. As I said, horrible joke. More on that, below. Little did I realize that after a _week_, the DNS change hadn't propagated everywhere yet. After I got the first few emails, I realized to my horror what had happened. So I immediately put the old page back. I guess the old server will be around for a little while longer while DNS continues to propagate. I'll say it here: the rumors of FreeDOS's death are exaggerated. My bad. Sorry. 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. We've been talking about a "1.0" release since Beta7 (2001) when we finally became stable. The FreeDOS Beta9 Service Release 2 was announced December 2005 (with "1.0" promised before Christmas 2005) and instead FreeDOS Beta9 Service Release 2 update 2 was posted May 2006. It's as though we're afraid of the "1.0" label, sort of asymptotically approaching "1.0" but never really getting there. But when I sat down on 28 June to write that "Happy Birthday" news item, I realized I couldn't do it. I'd given up waiting on "1.0". I wrote the "FreeDOS is dead" message instead. Sorry. -jh -- I'm sorry my president's an idiot. I didn't vote for him. 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
