Trying to get listed by the FSF is an exercise in futility. The FSF has long ago ceased being about technology. It's a religion, and Richard Stallman is its prophet. (I've met him, and know people who've known him for decades. He's an odd person. In Stallman's world, all software is FOSS, issued under the GPL. No surprise various Linux distros don't pass his compatibility tests.)
And open source has fragmented. My irony meter pegs off scale when one open source product cannot incorporate code from another because they are issued under incompatible licenses. (And Gnu is a Worst Offender - my understanding is that GPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2. That's just hopelessly stupid.) FreeDOS began as an effort to produce an open source OS compatible with DOS. It mostly succeeded. But people buy computers to do work or play, and the OS sits between the user,. the program they run, and the hardware. A *lot* of programs people want to run *aren't* open source, and won't be. Consider the popular DOSBox DOS emulator. *It* began as an effort to create an emulator that would let people play old DOS games on things that weren't DOS PCs. Those games were not open source, nor likely to become so. And folks here want to run DOS character mode emulation for productivity applications like word processors and spreadsheets. Those are highly unlikely to be open source, and even if open source products exist, people will want to run what they used back when. If what you ran is Lotus 123, there may not be a shareware or open source product that *can* replace it because they will lack Lotus 123 features you relied on. Even if it were possible for FreeDOS to get listed by the FSF, what would FreeDOS get out of it that would make the hoops worth trying to jump through? Ignore the FSF. The rest of the world increasingly is. Developments I'm following these days are generally under MIT or 2 clause BSD licenses, precisely to make the license as open and unrestricted as possible, and allow code sharing to happen. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
