Hi Willi,
I will wait some days to see if there are other questions or proposals referring to NewDOS and then send André Olejko a list with everything at one time in german...
He explicitly asked to NOT be bothered with such things. So I suggest that we just collect the questions and proposals ourselves and then, if necessary, get some publicity to find volunteers to implement them. Because I know ONE person who will NOT be among those volunteers ;-) Or maybe people simply enjoy the fact that they can manually READ the sources for those tools which already were available as freeware binary. Maybe there is no need whatsoever to change or compile anything, yet?
One of my questions will be if the source code of asm86 can/will be published.
That has VERY low priority. Plenty of FreeDOS apps need closed source or even non-free compilers. If anybody ever has an issue with that for NewDOS, we can still go the NoMySo way and (semi-automatically) port the sources to any free and open assembler and C compiler out there. If the author makes Asm86 open source at some point, fine, but I would recommend to not even ask for that right now. Maybe not even this YEAR. Another important detail: No matter which compilers you use, you cannot compile NewDOS out of the box right now! You will first have to take a deep breath, THINK which toolchain you need, configure it properly and come up with a nice build script or makefile. NONE of those is included in the sources, which were released AS-IS, rough and raw, but valuable. So before you ask for a license change to the assembler, let us FIRST see who and WHEN will undertake re-compiling this nice software. Either for the challenge or because they MAY have specific ideas for patches. All of this will take TIME. Not just some days. More likely months. Please compare this to the situation in 2020 when Steve and TK felt like taking the challenge to make it possible to actually COMPILE the GW BASIC sources released in what it turned out to be incomplete AS-IS state by Microsoft. Nobody would have asked Microsoft to FIRST make all involved compilers open source at that time. And nobody has asked Microsoft to publish the missing source code snippets. Because the situation was pretty much the same as now: The authors had looked into their archives, FOUND a mostly complete copy of the sources and said: We have this code GIFT, you MIGHT enjoy it, but we cannot and will not help you if it is not good enough for you! ;-)
I personally think that André Olejko did a great job, one single man created "a half OS"!
I totally agree that this is a cool collection of tools and it is great that the author made it free first and even open source now! We cannot and should not expect anything else. Thanks for the ZIPs! Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
