I love your outside the boxthinking on this. Best of luck!
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------- Original Message -------
On Sunday, September 11th, 2022 at 6:11 AM, Lukas Satin <luke.sa...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently I started to maintain several opensource projects. And this subject
> touches FreeDOS as well, so I'm asking what would be your argumentation for
> that.
>
> I remember opensource 20 years ago, it was great and as a student I had time
> to support or even develop my own projects. Companies did not release
> opensource yet.
>
> Today companies = business only = profit. They learn to use opensource
> because it is cheaper for them. Otherwise they would not use it. I think
> their main reason is give a little bit of code, so someone can test it and
> fix it for them, for free. That's it.
>
> Today's opensource developers, for example on Github, do it in their free
> time and they need also paid job. Their paid job is in a company, like
> something above, so they are heavily influenced by bad habits.
>
> This recently came to my attention when browsing several Github projects and
> their history. So lets say you have opensource project for 10-15 years and it
> provides some value, it provides a very broad operating systems support!
>
> Now the repository gets forked, because original mantainer does not have
> time, or in some cases, it is even original mantainer, who breaks it.
>
> What is happening right now: They delete files, they delete project
> configuration, they rewrite files.
>
> What they think they do: They think they are the best and they upgrade their
> project for latest OS (Windows 10, soon 11 or 12 as well as Linux)
>
> What they really do: Lack knowledge of design patterns, lack knowledge of
> using even development and git tools properly, lack understanding that 10
> years old project provides bigger value than their latest Win10 only breaking
> change.
>
> How would you argue with person like that? How would you try to explain to
> them that there is a better way?
>
> You see it everyday from Microsoft. They remove downloads (Windows 8.1 WDK /
> SDK is temporarily offline). Everytime you even ask a simple thing about
> Windows XP on DOS on ANY gaming forum, the first dumb user automatically
> replies: "It is not supported. Get away." - without even thinking as a human,
> without even thinking anything - it is automatic response pre-programmed by
> corporation marketing - they get it somewhere else, not from their head.
>
> Then, I look at the project, look at the code. And often it is very simple to
> keep old OS support. You just change a few parameters or recompile some
> library (as it was for the last 10 years anyway).
>
> Do you, as a FreeDOS have some opensource developer best practice guidelines?
> How do you look at this issue?
>
> There will be always corporation pressure to upgrade to the latest, support
> consumerism and increase ROI for stakeholders.
>
> But for opensource, developer needs to have a better mindset. Especially they
> start maintain 10-15 years old projects - they have bigger responsibility
> than just cut x86 architecture.
>
> I'm not saying they need to support and test old OS actively. But they should
> not rewrite project source history like spaghetti. The least they could do is:
> 1) create new project file (prj) for new OS (my_project_w10.prj) and keeping
> the original my_project.prj intact
> 2) create SDL1 branch and archive it (which can be used in FreeDOS), so
> community can sometime backport some changes there. Instead they rewrite the
> files, delete the files and you get mess
> 3) use more clever architecture or design pattern, like Adapter, to provide a
> specific implementation for specific OS. Lets say they have OS X now and they
> migrate to OS Y. Instead of rewriting half of git project, they would
> encapsulate OS Y specific calls in a separate file and this file will be used
> instead of original file for OS X based on project compilation settings or
> based on runtime configuration
>
> What I currently fight with:
> 1) intolerant aggressive people, who should be smart (as a developers mostly
> are)
> 2) automatic response: this is unsupported, this is deprecated => this is
> like parrot, they have pre-programmed automatic response from aggressive
> corporation marketing strategies
> 3) lack of understanding that 10-15 years old project is not only about his
> personal needs, but it is about community of people, who use it for 10-15
> years
> 4) lack of knowledge, no will or time to gain new knowledge => this results
> in 1)
> 5) lack of education what is opensource, what is preserving history for long
> time span projects and what is commercial oriented development
>
> So I forked several projects like that. Will fix them and record some Youtube
> video. I think I will also record some Youtube video about the content of
> this e-mail and provide some real life examples what was wrong on some
> project and how easy is it to fix it. For now, 90% of cases was only project
> configuration. Currently I am compiling some kernel driver and the only issue
> is project metadata were rewritten, so you cannot open and compile it on
> older OS.
>
> I post it here, because sometimes my argument is also: Hey, but because you
> think nobody is using it ,that is not true. Someone talk about it last month
> on FreeDOS. Some people are using it. Join FreeDOS mailing list. This was for
> example some SDL1 related project that could run on FreeDOS, but they were
> not aware of it. Currently I maintain 5 projects like that.
>
> Lukas
> Czechia
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