Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 1:29 PM Ben Sauvin wrote: > > Legacy applications can also be a lot of fun. For suitable values of the term. :-p > I used to work for a "high tech" company that ran a kind of ERP on DOS > machines. It was a mass of compiled COBOL, source code not available and the > company that produced it already gone out of business. Moving through > successive versions of Windows meant running this "ERP" in DOS boxes, which I > found cumbersome and frustrating. When I asked about the possibility of > moving to something a bit more modern, management explained that the cost of > reverse-engineering the data files, extracting the data and moving them to > another software stack would have been prohibitive. The wife of an old friend has been nominally retired for 7 years. But she still goes into the office one day a week. Her employer is a municipal government who has been migrating off a mainframe. She's a COBOL programmer, and there is still one critical application written in COBOL and not migrated that she supports. When it is finally migrated I expect to hear her shouts of "Free at last!" from here, and I'm an hour or so away from where they live by commuter rail. > I left them about three years before the year 2000. If they managed to find > some way to circumnavigate the Y2K buggery, it's certainly conceivable > they're still running that "ERP" after some twenty or thirty years, still in > DOS boxes even if they'd also since moved on to a more modern OS for their > desktops. Possible. But the issues of reverse engineering and extracting and migrating the data tend to be major reasons why outfits cling to old stuff. It's almost certain the data file formats were never documented, or if tehy were, teh documentation long ago lost any contact with the current reality of the file structures. > Their DOS install floppies are probably long since bit-rotted into oblivion. > I'd certainly like to think they could just install something like FreeDOS > and continue using their "ERP". They might be able to. I'd like to *think* they have long since migrated to something else, but I wouldn't bey money on it. __ Dennis ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 7:33 PM Jim Hall wrote: > On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:00 PM, dmccunney wrote: > > Agreed on being as free as possible, and the question is how free > > FreeDOS *can* be. > > > > The bigger question is "Why use FreeDOS at *all*?" No amount of > > freedom will compensate for no plausible use case to make the effort > > worth expending. See above about "hobbyist labor of' love." > > I'm disappointed to read the above statement. And I'm really confused > why you would write "Why use FreeDOS at all" on an email list that's > about FreeDOS. This is not helpful and does not contribute to the > FreeDOS community. I'm sorry you're disappointed, but it's a valid question. Suppose you give me *your* answer. Why do *you* think FreeDOS should be used? The FreeDOS mailing list goes to people who *use* FreeDOS. My question "Why use FreeDOS at all" doesn't apply to them nor is it likely to change their minds. They have reasons valid to *them* for doing so. Why should anybody *else* run it? > There are still lots of people who use FreeDOS. Some people use > FreeDOS to restore old PC hardware. Others use FreeDOS to play DOS > games or run legacy business software - either in a PC emulator or on > real hardware. A few people still use FreeDOS to run embedded systems. > What we all have is common is using FreeDOS. And that's what the > FreeDOS email lists are about. If you don't want to use FreeDOS, you > don't have to reply to the email list. I'm aware of why people on the FreeDOS list use it. A few are still clinging to and supporting the DOS setup they created and were happy with decades ago, and don't want to switch. As long as they *can* do that, more power to them, but at some point I don't think they'll be *able* to continue that way. The PC Gaming crowd is why DOSBox exists, and has the advantage of being cross-platform and allowing you to play PC games on things that *aren't* X86 based PCs. (I have some old DOS stuff running on an ARM based Android tablet using an Android port of DOSBox.) More simply want to run old DOS apps that will run under FreeDOS. But you can *run* most DOS applications on a machine running DOSBox, or on a Windows PC using a fork of DOSBox called vDOSPlus, which is how I do it. vDOSPlus implements a virtual machine with enough of what DOS programs expect to see to allow them to run. I have a number of older DOS apps I can run that way. Computers are tools that people use to work or play. The work or play is performed by applications that run on the computer. The basic question when getting a computer is "What do you need to do?" We are seeing increasing levels of application portability, as applications get written in scripting languages like Java or Python, or as HTML5/CSS/JavaScript bundles, or now written for the .NET framework which has been made open source and is available under Linux and OS/X. We are reaching the point where the OS you run simply may not *matter*. Your device choice will be matters of form factor and price, because the apps you need will run on whatever it happens to be. When I say FreeDOS, it's a bit like when I say Linux - in both cases, I am implicitly referring to the OS *kernel* There are lots of things, for example, that use a Linux kernel and are therefore Linux systems. My old Linksys WRT54G Wifi router was a Linux system. Because it used a Linux kernel, the source was available, and various third party efforts to replace the stock firmware appeared. I ran one called Tomato. Other things thqat have a Linux kernel uder the hood are the Amazon Kindle and B Nook eBook reader devices (and source for their Linux kernel and firmware is available. But the average user of those devices neither knows nor cares that Linux is under the hood, and doesn't *have* to know or care;. They can use the device to do what they want to do. This is a *good* thing. In terms of FreeDOS, properly speaking the challenge is to get the FreeDOS kernel to be the bootable OS on X86 hardware. If all you want to do is run old DOS software, or play old DOS games, you don't actually need to do that. So tell me, Jim: why should anyone go through the sometimes considerable effort to create a device that boots FreeDOS? I submit they will do it as a labor of love to see if they can, but the number who *will* do that is a small fraction of the total number of folks who just want to play old DOS games or run old DOS apps. Those folks simply don't *need* to *boot* FreeDOS an a device to do what they want to do. Suggesting that they *should* run FreeDOS in those cases is a disservice to them. > Jim __ Dennis ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Legacy applications can also be a lot of fun. I used to work for a "high tech" company that ran a kind of ERP on DOS machines. It was a mass of compiled COBOL, source code not available and the company that produced it already gone out of business. Moving through successive versions of Windows meant running this "ERP" in DOS boxes, which I found cumbersome and frustrating. When I asked about the possibility of moving to something a bit more modern, management explained that the cost of reverse-engineering the data files, extracting the data and moving them to another software stack would have been prohibitive. I left them about three years before the year 2000. If they managed to find some way to circumnavigate the Y2K buggery, it's certainly conceivable they're still running that "ERP" after some twenty or thirty years, still in DOS boxes even if they'd also since moved on to a more modern OS for their desktops. Their DOS install floppies are probably long since bit-rotted into oblivion. I'd certainly like to think they could just install something like FreeDOS and continue using their "ERP". On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:33 PM Jim Hall wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo wrote: > >> FreeDOS seems to mostly focus on "four freedoms" (free/libre), aka GPL > >> or OSI. As long as we're as "free" as possible, I think we're okay. It > >> gives us the most advantages, and it helps the most people. But I > >> don't think splitting hairs on that end will (practically) improve > >> anything much, if at all. > > > On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:00 PM, dmccunney > wrote: > > Agreed on being as free as possible, and the question is how free > > FreeDOS *can* be. > > > > The bigger question is "Why use FreeDOS at *all*?" No amount of > > freedom will compensate for no plausible use case to make the effort > > worth expending. See above about "hobbyist labor of' love." > > > I'm disappointed to read the above statement. And I'm really confused > why you would write "Why use FreeDOS at all" on an email list that's > about FreeDOS. This is not helpful and does not contribute to the > FreeDOS community. > > There are still lots of people who use FreeDOS. Some people use > FreeDOS to restore old PC hardware. Others use FreeDOS to play DOS > games or run legacy business software - either in a PC emulator or on > real hardware. A few people still use FreeDOS to run embedded systems. > What we all have is common is using FreeDOS. And that's what the > FreeDOS email lists are about. If you don't want to use FreeDOS, you > don't have to reply to the email list. > > Jim > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
In fact there are some companies still making money with DOS. I worked for a company until mid 2016 building embedded 386EX systems, which they still do up to now. They license Datalight ROMDOS as well as a BIOS from another vendor, but for that I do not remember the name... Once I was digging in documentation there out of curiosity, there were also some prices listet in it. The BIOS SDK+Source took 12.500€ (something around 14k $) IIRC + license fee for every device. Of course, we can discuss if an order of 14.000$ would make a big deal - it is definitely not, if you have to run a company. But still there is some money in this niche. The company I worked for is building radio modems+control devices for remote control of whatever you like, my job there was to put together the parts for a device that controls elevators. I know at least 2 elevators running DOS in our place, if I go around and look out for company-signs I will find more. The product is being sold since early 2000s and since it is a industry and not a consumer product it will be there for longer, butat least it will be serviced (and therefore making some more money). I suspect the hourly price for service of these devices to be at least 80$ without tax. Some of these 386 boards support PCI and USB with some ALI chipset and the drivers for this were written in that company. There are PCI-cards for radio-communication, that they also wrote the drivers for. (or at least, they bought drivers - which makes no difference - someone earned money for DOS-drivers.) (I still have some unfinished prototypes and gargabe from production line, which is able to start the bootloader, but some parts are marked with a red arrow on it - so something must be wrong with these.) Nils On 10/01/2018 01:00 AM, dmccunney wrote: On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo wrote: On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:17 AM dmccunney wrote: It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a permissive license. "No loss" might be inaccurate. While it may be trivial compared to "newer technology", it's impossible to say that their (MSDN?) revenue from such legacy software is so low as to be totally worthless. Fine. So call it "no loss worth *caring* about". I don't know what revenue from DOS related technologies MS may still generate, but the amount will be so low it simply won't be *visible* on a balance sheet or P statement. Far larger amounts will be attributable to *rounding* errors. Remember that they have hundreds of thousands of employees! Yep. And I'd be quite startled if the continuing revenue from DOS related stuff paid even *one* of those salaries. DOS is dead as a commercial . It has been for decades. Keeping variants of DOS and DOS apps running are usually hobby labors of love for those doing it. It's why I shake my head when people talk about getting new drivers written so DOS can support stuff created since after it was no longer maintained and supported. The people who can *do* that tend to be high level programmers who write code for a *living*, and expect to be *paid* for what they do. They are extremely unlikely to do it for free as a hobby, and who would *pay* them to do it for DOS? I don't know of anyone. DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. MS isn't the only vendor of a DOS-compatible OS. DR-DOS and ROM-DOS are still sold online. (Do OS/2 variants also count? Maybe.) Which OS/2 variants? The one I'm aware of is eComStation, https://www.ecomstation.com/. The outfit that makes it got the rights from IBM, and essentially services accounts that still have substantial OS/2 deployments, and it's cheaper and easier to try to continue to use OS/2 than migrate to a different architecture. (Stardock, who does stuff like the Window Blinds and Object Desktop enhancements for Windows, developed under OS/s, and tried to get the rights from Microsoft but were unsuccessful. Not sure what they might have done if they were able to get the rights, but support for 32 bit apps would have been a major improvement for the OS. Not supporting 32 bit Windows apps effectively killed it.) (I was an OS/2 admin at one point, running it on a machine that was a specialized telephony server, communicating with a predictive dialer. ITtjust ran, and if there was a problem - reboot and things worked. The company making the dialer ported the controlling app to NT Server.) There are a lot of aftermarket companies doing stuff like that. Corel WordPerfect is essentially supporting the large number of companies that ran WP for DOS back in the day, and moved to Windows versions. These days, Word owns the word processing market, so *new* sales of Corel WP to folks who weren't former WP users will be negligible. The same comment can be made about the outfit that still sells and supports former Borland IDEs and language products. There is revenue in supporting the existing market, but that market is
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On 9/30/2018 8:51 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 12:14 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user
wrote:
On 9/29/2018 3:09 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user
wrote:
I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can
this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting
some ideas
Not sure why you think VAL is the main target or only 16-bit linker
worth using. There are probably a dozen of freely available linkers
that can target 16-bit OMF for DOS.
Actually I was (and possibly still am) mixing up free tools. I confused
val with the freeware arrowsoft assembler. If it's not actually a
rebranded "masm" (as rumor at one time had it) it's probably fairly
close in syntax. For that reason itwould be a good (if not best)
candidate for being freely available and close in masm compatibility.
Arrowsoft 2.00c is indeed just a "hacked" MASM v4 (circa 1984? 16-bit
/ 286 only, if even fully that). I have no idea if it's truly
"freeware" but highly unlikely (depending on where it came from
originally, who owned the copyright, who had derivative or
redistribution rights or whatever). I wouldn't even know whom to ask.
It's almost ridiculous to even think about! MASM had lots of
variations and got redistributed a lot.
Arrowsoft was available on Simtel.net (well, v1) and many other sites
(Garbo?) for decades. No one ever complained. You'd think MS would've
noticed such an obvious MASM compatible "clone". Of course, none of us
noobs had any experience with ancient MASMs either. Most people only
used v5 (1987? 386 support) or v6 (1991? more powerful, better
syntax), if even that much.
IIRC, Arrowsoft's ASM.EXE needed a linker, so someone bundled it
(VALARROW.ZIP or whatever on Simtel.net) with other tools (X2B for
EXE2BIN, TED for editor, VAL for linker). Maybe that's what you're
remembering.
I tend to think I'm remembering it from Simtel, yes. And that's probably
why I thought it was the val package too.
JWasm is a fork of OpenWatcom's WASM. It's meant to be (more) MASM
compatible, specifically v6. It also supports v5 syntax (-Zm).
OpenWatcom is OSI approved ("open source") but disliked by FSF as
"non-free". This is a weird exception since usually both OSI and FSF
agree on licensing. Anyways, JWasm is very good, free-ish, and doesn't
need a linker (but also supports OMF/OBJ). It also has a 16-bit
real-mode version (JWasmR.exe) and a 32-bit full version (JWasmD.exe)
and can even be recompiled with DJGPP (GCC), among many others. I'm
not in contact with him, but Japheth has a prerelease of a newer
version on Github (but implies "Windows only binary, use atop HX"
nowadays). My point is that we should prefer JWasm if we direly need
MASM syntax. (Otherwise, use whatever: NASM, YASM, FASM, etc.)
Here's some interesting links (huge understatement), even though I
don't even barely pretend to grok MASM syntax:
* https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/JWasm
* https://sites.google.com/site/pcdosretro/masmhist
* http://bytepointer.com/masm/index.htm
* http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/DOS/index.html
Thank you for the links
Personally speaking I'm not that picky about which one I'd use (since
I'm not writing assembly, only trying to compile it). I'd be happy to
stick with the assembler that's included in the repository, if it worked
on my computer. But it doesn't work for me on 86box or virtualbox. I'm
not ruling out user error, of course; and I still haven't tried qemu or
vmware yet.
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Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi,
On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 12:14 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user
wrote:
> On 9/29/2018 3:09 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user
> > wrote:
> >> I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can
> >> this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting
> >> some ideas
> > Not sure why you think VAL is the main target or only 16-bit linker
> > worth using. There are probably a dozen of freely available linkers
> > that can target 16-bit OMF for DOS.
>
> Actually I was (and possibly still am) mixing up free tools. I confused
> val with the freeware arrowsoft assembler. If it's not actually a
> rebranded "masm" (as rumor at one time had it) it's probably fairly
> close in syntax. For that reason itwould be a good (if not best)
> candidate for being freely available and close in masm compatibility.
Arrowsoft 2.00c is indeed just a "hacked" MASM v4 (circa 1984? 16-bit
/ 286 only, if even fully that). I have no idea if it's truly
"freeware" but highly unlikely (depending on where it came from
originally, who owned the copyright, who had derivative or
redistribution rights or whatever). I wouldn't even know whom to ask.
It's almost ridiculous to even think about! MASM had lots of
variations and got redistributed a lot.
Arrowsoft was available on Simtel.net (well, v1) and many other sites
(Garbo?) for decades. No one ever complained. You'd think MS would've
noticed such an obvious MASM compatible "clone". Of course, none of us
noobs had any experience with ancient MASMs either. Most people only
used v5 (1987? 386 support) or v6 (1991? more powerful, better
syntax), if even that much.
IIRC, Arrowsoft's ASM.EXE needed a linker, so someone bundled it
(VALARROW.ZIP or whatever on Simtel.net) with other tools (X2B for
EXE2BIN, TED for editor, VAL for linker). Maybe that's what you're
remembering.
JWasm is a fork of OpenWatcom's WASM. It's meant to be (more) MASM
compatible, specifically v6. It also supports v5 syntax (-Zm).
OpenWatcom is OSI approved ("open source") but disliked by FSF as
"non-free". This is a weird exception since usually both OSI and FSF
agree on licensing. Anyways, JWasm is very good, free-ish, and doesn't
need a linker (but also supports OMF/OBJ). It also has a 16-bit
real-mode version (JWasmR.exe) and a 32-bit full version (JWasmD.exe)
and can even be recompiled with DJGPP (GCC), among many others. I'm
not in contact with him, but Japheth has a prerelease of a newer
version on Github (but implies "Windows only binary, use atop HX"
nowadays). My point is that we should prefer JWasm if we direly need
MASM syntax. (Otherwise, use whatever: NASM, YASM, FASM, etc.)
Here's some interesting links (huge understatement), even though I
don't even barely pretend to grok MASM syntax:
* https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/JWasm
* https://sites.google.com/site/pcdosretro/masmhist
* http://bytepointer.com/masm/index.htm
* http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/DOS/index.html
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Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi, On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:02 PM dmccunney wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo wrote: > > > > "No loss" might be inaccurate. While it may be trivial compared to > > "newer technology", it's impossible to say that their (MSDN?) revenue > > from such legacy software is so low as to be totally worthless. > > Fine. So call it "no loss worth *caring* about". I don't know what > revenue from DOS related technologies MS may still generate, but the > amount will be so low it simply won't be *visible* on a balance sheet > or P statement. Far larger amounts will be attributable to > *rounding* errors. Okay, but even if it was practically worthless, it is still copyrighted, and thus still protected (and actively enforced). Does that make sense for MS-DOS? Probably not (to me), but I'm not a judge. But I can't honestly care anyways because FreeDOS works great (and is "free"). Heck, even having other vendors' OS for purchase online is better than literally nothing. Yes, there are still people who idolize MS-DOS and redistribute it unfairly (or maybe their host country is more lenient, dunno!), but I don't see the point. That doesn't mean I want such software to disappear and die with no one to use it. I do think that when it's no longer sold nor directly available (somehow) from the original vendor, then it should be "opened" (freed). Software just doesn't age well, and it should be used before the opportunity disappears. Even 20 years later is quite a long time for (software) copyright. But whatever, lost cause. It's just somewhat redundant having to rewrite everything from scratch because of bungled legal trivia (which was an accidental oversight or poorly thought out, at best). Whatever, FreeDOS rocks! Everything else is only as good as how (and if) you can use it (if you can find it). Practically speaking, no matter how good a solution, if you can't find it or afford it, then it's useless. > > > Remember that they have hundreds of thousands of employees! > > Yep. And I'd be quite startled if the continuing revenue from DOS > related stuff paid even *one* of those salaries. DOS is dead as a > commercial . It has been for decades. Keeping variants of DOS and > DOS apps running are usually hobby labors of love for those doing it. Linux is also a labor of love, historically. I'm sure you'll mention that most contributors to the kernel are paid, but there's still tons of contributors who aren't. Not to mention that they basically give (almost) all of it away "freely" (with the mild expectation that you contribute back, if possible). Like I said, at least two other major DOS vendors still sell their OS(es) online, so it's not quite "dead" to them! I've never used one (although it definitely sounds intriguing), but the other worked very well for me years ago (2004-10?). I'm not that naive to pretend that DOS is a major force in the world anymore ... but it does exist, and it does (sometimes) work! BTW, IIRC, Pat called his (two years? worth of) work on the FreeDOS book a "labor of love". Certainly most people aren't appreciative, sadly, but it's had several truly brilliant contributors over the years (not me!), and it works well for what it does. It's quite genius, really, and I'm only sad that people scorn it and are so condescending towards it just because Linux is more flexible. (Obviously things like DOSEMU2 combine the two, best of both worlds. Yes, people who worked on that [Hans, Bart, Stas, etc] are geniuses.) > It's why I shake my head when people talk about getting new drivers > written so DOS can support stuff created since after it was no longer > maintained and supported. The people who can *do* that tend to be > high level programmers who write code for a *living*, and expect to be > *paid* for what they do. They are extremely unlikely to do it for > free as a hobby, and who would *pay* them to do it for DOS? I don't > know of anyone. No one has ever even pretended. By that I mean no competent dev has ever approached us. But why would they? FreeDOS wants to be "free", that's the whole point. That doesn't mean there can't be bounties. All GPL advocates know that. The simple truth is that the people skilled enough to do it (not me!) don't want to do it at all. Or maybe most of them can't, it's certainly not as easy as it sounds. Let's not pretend that things are either totally impossible or highly likely. It's somewhere in the middle. This is not an obscure OS, though, it's been around for decades, so certainly many people have experience with it. (Maybe not millenials, but they could probably learn, if motivated.) > > > DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. > > > > MS isn't the only vendor of a DOS-compatible OS. DR-DOS and ROM-DOS > > are still sold online. (Do OS/2 variants also count? Maybe.) > > Which OS/2 variants? The one I'm aware of is eComStation, I haven't tried either, but I was referring moreso to Arca Noae. > > Yes, DOS is
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo wrote: >> FreeDOS seems to mostly focus on "four freedoms" (free/libre), aka GPL >> or OSI. As long as we're as "free" as possible, I think we're okay. It >> gives us the most advantages, and it helps the most people. But I >> don't think splitting hairs on that end will (practically) improve >> anything much, if at all. On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:00 PM, dmccunney wrote: > Agreed on being as free as possible, and the question is how free > FreeDOS *can* be. > > The bigger question is "Why use FreeDOS at *all*?" No amount of > freedom will compensate for no plausible use case to make the effort > worth expending. See above about "hobbyist labor of' love." I'm disappointed to read the above statement. And I'm really confused why you would write "Why use FreeDOS at all" on an email list that's about FreeDOS. This is not helpful and does not contribute to the FreeDOS community. There are still lots of people who use FreeDOS. Some people use FreeDOS to restore old PC hardware. Others use FreeDOS to play DOS games or run legacy business software - either in a PC emulator or on real hardware. A few people still use FreeDOS to run embedded systems. What we all have is common is using FreeDOS. And that's what the FreeDOS email lists are about. If you don't want to use FreeDOS, you don't have to reply to the email list. Jim ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo wrote: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:17 AM dmccunney wrote: > > > > It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a permissive > > license. > > "No loss" might be inaccurate. While it may be trivial compared to > "newer technology", it's impossible to say that their (MSDN?) revenue > from such legacy software is so low as to be totally worthless. Fine. So call it "no loss worth *caring* about". I don't know what revenue from DOS related technologies MS may still generate, but the amount will be so low it simply won't be *visible* on a balance sheet or P statement. Far larger amounts will be attributable to *rounding* errors. > > Remember that they have hundreds of thousands of employees! Yep. And I'd be quite startled if the continuing revenue from DOS related stuff paid even *one* of those salaries. DOS is dead as a commercial . It has been for decades. Keeping variants of DOS and DOS apps running are usually hobby labors of love for those doing it. It's why I shake my head when people talk about getting new drivers written so DOS can support stuff created since after it was no longer maintained and supported. The people who can *do* that tend to be high level programmers who write code for a *living*, and expect to be *paid* for what they do. They are extremely unlikely to do it for free as a hobby, and who would *pay* them to do it for DOS? I don't know of anyone. > > DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. > > MS isn't the only vendor of a DOS-compatible OS. DR-DOS and ROM-DOS > are still sold online. (Do OS/2 variants also count? Maybe.) Which OS/2 variants? The one I'm aware of is eComStation, https://www.ecomstation.com/. The outfit that makes it got the rights from IBM, and essentially services accounts that still have substantial OS/2 deployments, and it's cheaper and easier to try to continue to use OS/2 than migrate to a different architecture. (Stardock, who does stuff like the Window Blinds and Object Desktop enhancements for Windows, developed under OS/s, and tried to get the rights from Microsoft but were unsuccessful. Not sure what they might have done if they were able to get the rights, but support for 32 bit apps would have been a major improvement for the OS. Not supporting 32 bit Windows apps effectively killed it.) (I was an OS/2 admin at one point, running it on a machine that was a specialized telephony server, communicating with a predictive dialer. ITtjust ran, and if there was a problem - reboot and things worked. The company making the dialer ported the controlling app to NT Server.) There are a lot of aftermarket companies doing stuff like that. Corel WordPerfect is essentially supporting the large number of companies that ran WP for DOS back in the day, and moved to Windows versions. These days, Word owns the word processing market, so *new* sales of Corel WP to folks who weren't former WP users will be negligible. The same comment can be made about the outfit that still sells and supports former Borland IDEs and language products. There is revenue in supporting the existing market, but that market is highly unlikely to grow. > Yes, DOS is unpopular nowadays, but it's still a well-known niche. You have a talent for understatement. > There's also still a fair amount of commercial DOS software being > sold (not just games but apps, even if they haven't been updated in years). How much *money* is in the niche? "Even if they haven't been updated in years" is a telling statement. The former development efforts are sunk costs. It's fairly trivial to keep selling existing DOS products that have already repaid the costs of developing them. But are any of those outfits doing *new* development? Show me one... > It's easy to trivialize the decades of DOS legacy that survives. But > certainly just because some hipster/geek somewhere declared DOS "dead" > didn't immediately make all DOS software freeware and/or "open > source". (If some government somewhere did that, there would be > complaints. Granted, a lot of stuff is in legal limbo and unused for > no good reason, so maybe that should be freed, if literally no one can > use it otherwise, but you know that will never happen, sadly.) I don't trivialize it. My only point is that there is no longer *money* in it, and no one has reason to do *new* DOS product development. It's all about the money. > > (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under something > > other than the GPL.) > > I don't honestly know if that's even legally possible now that Pat has > died. (Gotta love legalese, ugh. No, I'm not a lawyer.) I don't believe it is possible. > I also don't think GPL hinders many potential contributors (versus, > what, BSD two-clause??). I'll admit that GPL can cause some practical > problems, in rare cases, but it also avoids or solves some other > practical problems (again, in some rare cases). The
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On 9/30/2018 1:34 PM, geneb wrote: Visual Studio for Macintosh will handle the issue for MacOS, Xamarin will handle the issue for Linux and I don't know of anyone that uses a GUI on FreeBSD. :) Yes, I know ARM isn't an OS. That's not the point. The .NET Micro Framework specifically targets ARM CPUs. Again, show me a project that you can create on any one of those environments, can take it to another, recompile if deemed necessary and run it. You will utterly fail... You're basically talking out your ass as obviously have no actual experience using the tool chain that you're sneering at. You're apparrently under the common misconception that your opinions have the same value as other people's facts. They do not. You should be very careful about your statements. I am pretty sure that I am programming longer than you are alive, with all the positive and negative experiences that come with it. *plonk* Just the same... Ralf --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018, Ralf Quint wrote: On 9/30/2018 10:18 AM, geneb wrote: On Sat, 29 Sep 2018, Ralf Quint wrote: I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take a hint from that... Yeah, I really hate non-portable software that only runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and ARM. Please recompile any non-trivial GUI program written for Windows using .NET and try to run it on those other OS (btw, ARM is not an OS)... Visual Studio for Macintosh will handle the issue for MacOS, Xamarin will handle the issue for Linux and I don't know of anyone that uses a GUI on FreeBSD. :) Yes, I know ARM isn't an OS. That's not the point. The .NET Micro Framework specifically targets ARM CPUs. You're basically talking out your ass as obviously have no actual experience using the tool chain that you're sneering at. You're apparrently under the common misconception that your opinions have the same value as other people's facts. They do not. *plonk* g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On 9/30/2018 10:18 AM, geneb wrote: On Sat, 29 Sep 2018, Ralf Quint wrote: I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take a hint from that... Yeah, I really hate non-portable software that only runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and ARM. Please recompile any non-trivial GUI program written for Windows using .NET and try to run it on those other OS (btw, ARM is not an OS)... Ralf --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sat, 29 Sep 2018, Ralf Quint wrote: I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take a hint from that... Yeah, I really hate non-portable software that only runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and ARM. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 12:13 AM, Random Liegh wrote: > > > * On 9/29/2018 3:09 PM, Rugxulo wrote: * >> >> >> * Hi,* >> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 3:47 AM Random Liegh wrote: >> >>> I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can >>> this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting >>> some ideas >>> >> >> >> * Not sure why you think VAL is the main target or only 16-bit linker >> worth using. There are probably a dozen of freely available linkers that >> can target 16-bit OMF for DOS.* >> > > Actually I was (and possibly still am) mixing up free tools. I confused > val with the freeware arrowsoft assembler. If it's not actually a rebranded > "masm" (as rumor at one time had it) it's probably fairly close in syntax. > For that reason itwould be a good (if not best) candidate for being freely > available and close in masm compatibility. > Yes, we removed the Arrowsoft Assembler because it appeared to be a copy of Microsoft's MASM. We wrote a technical note about this in 2011. The technote is offline, but the summary is: Luchezar Georgiev (Lucho) identified the following: The code of ArrowAsm 1.00D and MASM 3.00 is identical, and the changes are only the some strings. This means that there is no restriction in the size of the source files it can process, contrary to what's written in the documentation, which I proved with a simple test. There is also 462 bytes of unused garbage appended to the executable of the ArrowAsm, which is not present in MASM 3.00. Things are much more complex in the ArrowAsm 2.00c. First, the file is compressed. When I uncompressed it using IUP by Frank Zago, the uncompressed file size turned out to be exactly the same as the size of MASM 4.00! But the code is "only" about 99.9% same. The .ERR* directives (.ERR, .ERRNB, ERRNDEF, .ERRNZ, .ERR1, .ERR2, .ERRB, .ERRE, .ERRDEF, .ERRDIF, .ERRIDN) have been removed from the strings, and a small piece of code (their processing?!) was patched over with some other code - maybe a code that limits the size of the source file to 64 KB and issues an error message if it's longer, albeit I was unable to trigger that message. Unlike the code, the strings are significantly patched, obviously to hide the similarity with the original product. And in a followup: As to version 2.00c, I understood that they've zeroed the string "LZ91" at offset 1Ch-1Fh in ASM.EXE. If you restore it, UNLZEXE is then able to unpack the file to the same size as MASM 4.00. Now both files can be compared visually with the excellent FCB utility by Uwe Sieber. (Restoring the "LZ91" string can also be done with it, by the way :) There are much more different bytes than in the first version, but still only 5565 (6-7% of the total file size. Excluding the EXE file header, the bodies of both files have just 3502 different bytes (4% of the body size). There is no way this can be a mere coincidence! Another method used Linux cmp to show MASM and Arrowsoft's Assembler were essentially the same. Dave from DDS provided a similar comparison using a different method; he used CUP386 to unpack ASM.EXE, then wrote a small program to sift through the two, looking for matching sections. This provided overwhelming suggestion that Arrowsoft was a modified copy of MASM. We felt it was best to drop Arrowsoft from FreeDOS. And effective 2011-08-03, Arrow was removed from our archives at ibiblio, and deleted from our software list. (I really should add this to the wiki instead so I can reference it there instead) ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
> > > > > (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under > something other than the GPL.) > > I don't honestly know if that's even legally possible now that Pat has > died. (Gotta love legalese, ugh. No, I'm not a lawyer.) > > Correct. Re-licensing the code base would require all contributors to agree to the change. And with Pat's death, there's no way to get Pat to agree to such a thing. Also, I am unlikely to change my contributions to something other than GNU GPL. So that's a non-starter. But I don't think GNU GPL is a problem for many developers, as Rugxulo also explains: > I also don't think GPL hinders many potential contributors (versus, > what, BSD two-clause??). I'll admit that GPL can cause some practical > problems, in rare cases, but it also avoids or solves some other > practical problems (again, in some rare cases). > > FreeDOS seems to mostly focus on "four freedoms" (free/libre), aka GPL > or OSI. As long as we're as "free" as possible, I think we're okay. It > gives us the most advantages, and it helps the most people. But I > don't think splitting hairs on that end will (practically) improve > anything much, if at all. > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On 9/29/2018 3:09 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user wrote: I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting some ideas Not sure why you think VAL is the main target or only 16-bit linker worth using. There are probably a dozen of freely available linkers that can target 16-bit OMF for DOS. Actually I was (and possibly still am) mixing up free tools. I confused val with the freeware arrowsoft assembler. If it's not actually a rebranded "masm" (as rumor at one time had it) it's probably fairly close in syntax. For that reason itwould be a good (if not best) candidate for being freely available and close in masm compatibility. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi, On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 5:39 PM dmccunney wrote: > > Those were the days when MS was the outfit who got a start writing a > version of BASIC for microcomputers, and got asked by IBM to craft > an OS for the then new IBM PC. Outsourcing software development was also a way for IBM to avoid infighting and legal liability (which was a problem for them, apparently). But even the IBM PC was more of a stopgap measure. Well, at least the 8086 wasn't meant to be long-term viable. It was more or less a temporary competitor to the Z80 while Intel was busy working on more mature solutions like the (failed) iAPX 432. (As much as people hate on the 8086 and segmentation, they sure seem to have loved the 386.) MS just played along so that they could keep selling their compilers/languages. Also, later they didn't want to be tied down by following others (e.g. Xenix and AT). > MS bought a product called 86DOS from an outfit called > Seattle Computer Products that made machines based on an 8086 CPU and > an S100 bus, and used that as the base for what became MSDOS. New-fangled 16-bit versus traditional 8-bit, which more was common at the time. It was supposed to be more powerful, make things easier. (Loosely similar to all the 64-bit hype nowadays, although I'd say the overall improvement is less. But most people clearly prefer 64-bit nowadys for various reasons, whether fair or not. But 32-bit isn't quite "dead" yet, so I guess even they have to admit it's still a market worth catering to, barely. Or maybe it's harder to adopt than it sounds. Such transitions are never easy, even after many years.) > It looked a lot like Digital Research's CP/M under the hood to make it > easy to port popular CP/M applications like WordStar and VisiCalc to > the new architecture. CP/M-86 wasn't available yet, so they had little choice but to buy/write their own. > (And I recall when the OS war was DOS vs CP/M86 > vs UCSD Psystem vs DRDOS on the PC. MS won.) DR-DOS didn't come until later (1988??). IIRC, that was basically a DOS-only variant of CP/M-86. That was after many people dropped CP/M in favor of MS-DOS only (1987?). Even IBM tried to replace DOS with OS/2 around that time, but RAM shortages hurt. (And the "DOS extender" noticeably took away one obvious advantage of OS/2.) But of course also IBM fired MS (1990 or 1991), so they both went their separate ways with incompatible projects. > IBM hasn't been the Evil Empire for quite some time. MS is in the > process of trying to mend its ways and *not* be the Evil Empire any > more. IBM and MS were what they once were for purposes of account > control. That no longer works, and both companies know it. They've had a new CEO since five years. Yes, he's done many changes. (Honestly, MS already gets a rep as being internally fragmented, too many projects, too many competing teams. They gain and lose interest in various projects at seemingly random. Too much bread in soggy waters or whatever.) (I don't wish to be too cynical, but ... I remember when they announced the new CEO. His Wikipedia page had more edits in that single day, even before he actually did anything, than it did in its entire existence previously. Yeah, people are morbidly obsessed with symbolic power.) > > I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, > > dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java > > fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to > > terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take > > a hint from that... > > Sorry, but you're behind in your understanding. .NET is core > technology for Windows, increasingly used by all manner of things. I don't know if .NET is truly used universally in Windows proper. Some few things may use it, and I know they pushed it heavily, but I don't know if that was ever (or still is) heavily used enough in Windows 10 to be that dire. They had some minimal support, but most of it had to be downloaded separately (optionally). > (Current development is around .NET Core, which is a new flavor of the > framework.) Linux already had the Mono project to implement an open > source equivalent of .NET. MS engineers are major contributors to > Mono, and MS has open sourced the whole thing. They are very proud of it. And many many developers always say they love C# (although I've never even pretended to learn it). Anders Hejlsberg was the chief architect of C#, and he was the guy behind Turbo Pascal (and later, TypeScript). The TIOBE Index (flawed, I know) lists VB.NET and C# as fifth and sixth place, respectively. And there have been two (or more?) "standards" of C# while Java has never been standardized. Yes, I know, C# is (historically?) Windows only, but people love it to death. The comparison to Java is because both are "managed" (garbage collected). Java is still "numero uno" overall. * https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ > This means portable applications,
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi, On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:17 AM dmccunney wrote: > > It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a permissive > license. "No loss" might be inaccurate. While it may be trivial compared to "newer technology", it's impossible to say that their (MSDN?) revenue from such legacy software is so low as to be totally worthless. Remember that they have hundreds of thousands of employees! > DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. MS isn't the only vendor of a DOS-compatible OS. DR-DOS and ROM-DOS are still sold online. (Do OS/2 variants also count? Maybe.) Yes, DOS is unpopular nowadays, but it's still a well-known niche. There's also still a fair amount of commercial DOS software being sold (not just games but apps, even if they haven't been updated in years). It's easy to trivialize the decades of DOS legacy that survives. But certainly just because some hipster/geek somewhere declared DOS "dead" didn't immediately make all DOS software freeware and/or "open source". (If some government somewhere did that, there would be complaints. Granted, a lot of stuff is in legal limbo and unused for no good reason, so maybe that should be freed, if literally no one can use it otherwise, but you know that will never happen, sadly.) > (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under something > other than the GPL.) I don't honestly know if that's even legally possible now that Pat has died. (Gotta love legalese, ugh. No, I'm not a lawyer.) I also don't think GPL hinders many potential contributors (versus, what, BSD two-clause??). I'll admit that GPL can cause some practical problems, in rare cases, but it also avoids or solves some other practical problems (again, in some rare cases). FreeDOS seems to mostly focus on "four freedoms" (free/libre), aka GPL or OSI. As long as we're as "free" as possible, I think we're okay. It gives us the most advantages, and it helps the most people. But I don't think splitting hairs on that end will (practically) improve anything much, if at all. There aren't a lot of DOS contributors anyways. Heck, most people act like they can't even install a compiler or figure out a "simple" makefile. I do honestly wonder where all the decades-worth of DOS-savvy developers went. Certainly not everyone forgot literally everything, but it's such a complex world, and people have other priorities. It's just sad that so much working software was abandoned, deprecated, thrown away, left to rot. I think most people just don't care (but certainly many act like they can't figure out anything). I mean, when even a noob like me can get more done than them, you know something's wrong! ;-) People give up too easily, dismiss failure as "normal", they have really low thresholds of patience and testing. I think software is overengineered. Simplicity is a virtue (says Dr. Wirth). I think it takes a lot of hard work and effort to simplify things (without losing functionality). It takes a genius to be simple and elegant. But most people don't have the time, patience, or energy to do it. Or maybe I'm idealizing too much. It's a complicated world. (And no, obviously I'm no genius.) (Sorry for the ramble.) ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi, On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user wrote: > > I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can > this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting > some ideas Not sure why you think VAL is the main target or only 16-bit linker worth using. There are probably a dozen of freely available linkers that can target 16-bit OMF for DOS. MS used to still publicly host their last 16-bit linker (circa 1994) somewhere (FTP?) (but using PharLap Extender, thus it was 32-bit hosted but targeted 16-bit. Although even OMF/OBJ had 32-bit extensions in later compilers by Borland and MS, et al). I think MS VC 1.52 was the last to support 16-bit stuff (although I've never used it, don't have it, don't need it, don't care, etc), so that particular linker is almost definitely related to that suite (patched version add-on?). My main reason for investigating linkers was using an ancient (circa 1991?) freeware compiler for DOS (Oberon-M 1.2 by Erwin Videki). It's so old that it was from when LINK was still included in MS-DOS proper, hence he didn't include his own, so I had to find a replacement. So I tried a bunch of linkers and had to write a small patch util to nop out an "obsolete" (REGINT) record from the "main" .OBJ for it to work with certain linkers. Japheth even patched his JWlink for me because Wlink didn't handle it properly. Honestly, I have no direct interest in this ancient MS-DOS re-release, even though I guess it's cool that they open-sourced it. It's too weak (DJGPP won't run), and FreeDOS is already more functional. (But I guess it's "better" for 8086 retro users who care about low RAM usage.) Sorry for the rambling about linkers, just saying that we have various other alternatives (e.g. Alink, Valx, Warplink). ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:47 PM Ralf Quint wrote: > On 9/29/2018 6:14 AM, dmccunney wrote: > > > > IIRC, the FreeDOS kernel is written largely in C, so the ASM source > > isn't directly usable. It may be useful to go spelunking for the > > algorithms used and how corner cases were handled. > It certainly can help to deal with issues that arise out of undocumented > features/bugs/issues, which in the past had to be re-implemented by > re-engineering or plain guess work... > > > > MS is trying to shed the Evil Empire mantle it inherited from IBM, and > > show how cooperative it is. > M$ didn't have to inherit any "Evil Empire mantle" from IBM, it got that > one all by its own making. IBM has in the past (properly) open sourced a > lot of stuff, like the whole Symphony suite, as soon as it didn't serve > any revenue purposes anymore. I go back to the days when IBM *was* the Evil Empire, and the trade magazines regularly ran stories about IBM sales reps threatening to get DP managers fired if they *didn't* buy IBM gear. Those were the days when MS was the outfit who got a start writing a version of BASIC for microcomputers, and got asked by IBM to craft an OS for the then new IBM PC. MS bought a product called 86DOS from an outfit called Seattle Computer Products that made machines based on an 8086 CPU and an S100 bus, and used that as the base for what became MSDOS. It looked a lot like Digital Research's CP/M under the hood to make it easy to port popular CP/M applications like WordStar and VisiCalc to the new architecture. (And I recall when the OS war was DOS vs CP/M86 vs UCSD Psystem vs DRDOS on the PC. MS won.) IBM got into open source rather later, and I have an open source IBM product or two here, like the Eclipse programming IDE, written in Java and portable. Eclipse pretty much killed off the market for commercial IDEs. Borland's products along that line still exist under new owners, but they basically appeal to shops that used the Borland versions back when and they are too heavily embedded to make switching easy. IBM hasn't been the Evil Empire for quite some time. MS is in the process of trying to mend its ways and *not* be the Evil Empire any more. IBM and MS were what they once were for purposes of account control. That no longer works, and both companies know it. > > This release impresses me rather less > > than open sourcing .NET. And, MS now owns Github. > I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, > dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java > fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to > terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take > a hint from that... Sorry, but you're behind in your understanding. .NET is core technology for Windows, increasingly used by all manner of things. (Current development is around .NET Core, which is a new flavor of the framework.) Linux already had the Mono project to implement an open source equivalent of .NET. MS engineers are major contributors to Mono, and MS has open sourced the whole thing. This means portable applications, because the .NET framework provides the underlying runtimes, and you can code in C#, F# or the like and expect your code to run under Windows and Linux. The surface is only beginning to be scratched. And .NET isn't really a Java substitute. You can run both, and I do. What we are seeing now is a side effect of the steady advance of hardware, which got progressively smaller, faster, and cheaper. It's now possible to run apps in scripting languages like Python where you formerly had to write in something like C and compile to native code, because the hardware is fast enough you don't *need* to compile to native code to get acceptable performance. MS can no longer assume that the whole world runs on X86 architecture, and there's an awful lot of ARM based kit out there. (Think most smartphones and tablets.) It's a multi-platform world and MS must work with it. To make life more interesting, look at compilers. Compilers like GCC are in two parts - a front end parser for supported languages, and back end code generator producing object code for the specified platform. Compilers like that need an intermediate architecture independent language representation. The front end compiles to it, and the back end translates it to object code. In compilers like Clang on top of LLVM, the intermediate language may be JavaScript, and there may be no reason to compile to machine code. Fast optimizing JIT compilers for JavaScript are available for major platforms that compile JS to native code for execution, so just compile to JS and drop that directly onto the target machine. I'd call GCC's days numbered. > > It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a > > permissive license. DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a > > long time. > Well, MS-DOS 1.25 is indeed not much of value, but
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
>> IIRC, the FreeDOS kernel is written largely in C, so the ASM source >> isn't directly usable. It may be useful to go spelunking for the >> algorithms used and how corner cases were handled. > It certainly can help to deal with issues that arise out of undocumented > features/bugs/issues, which in the past had to be re-implemented by > re-engineering or plain guess work... Frankly, not so much. the relevant facts about MSDOS like internal structures, memory layout aso. have been re-engineered/disassembled, documented and commented by Andrew Schulman, Mike Podanowsky, and MANY others, and merged in an almost complete (and almost correct) documented DOS API by Ralph Brown. thanks to them, and there is close to nothing to be learned by studying old MSDOS sources. there are not many 'algorithms' needed to implement xxDOS, and 'corner cases' (once you know there is such a case) are easily identified, and traced by either writing a small test program, or simply stepping MSDOS execution. Easier at least then trying to understand by reading MSDOS 2.0 sources. >> (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* >> re-licensed under something other than the GPL.) > Now THAT is something I would agree with you, even if just to get rid of > Stallmanitis (thanks Tom! ;-) ) while I agree, this is not going to happen. a) there is no such thing as FreeDOS with a single license; even in my *really* minimum setup of kernel, command, himem you have 2 different licenses. b) even for the kernel alone, you have a dozen+ developers; at least one of them is dead. no way to have them agree to a different license. tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On 9/29/2018 6:14 AM, dmccunney wrote: IIRC, the FreeDOS kernel is written largely in C, so the ASM source isn't directly usable. It may be useful to go spelunking for the algorithms used and how corner cases were handled. It certainly can help to deal with issues that arise out of undocumented features/bugs/issues, which in the past had to be re-implemented by re-engineering or plain guess work... MS is trying to shed the Evil Empire mantle it inherited from IBM, and show how cooperative it is. M$ didn't have to inherit any "Evil Empire mantle" from IBM, it got that one all by its own making. IBM has in the past (properly) open sourced a lot of stuff, like the whole Symphony suite, as soon as it didn't serve any revenue purposes anymore. This release impresses me rather less than open sourcing .NET. And, MS now owns Github. I couldn't care less about .NET, it's pretty much a non-portable, dead-end technology, just years behind the curve. A lot of former Java fanatics (for which .NET became a substitute once M$ could not get to terms with Sun) have jumped that ship already in the past. M$ could take a hint from that... It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a permissive license. DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. Well, MS-DOS 1.25 is indeed not much of value, but even later DOS versions build on the changes that where introduced with DOS 2.0 (file handles instead of FCBs, for example; directories, which did not exist in any 1.x DOS;...) (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under something other than the GPL.) Now THAT is something I would agree with you, even if just to get rid of Stallmanitis (thanks Tom! ;-) ) I would not be extremely surprised if more of Windows got open sourced. The money these days is in cloud services, and Windows hasn't been the main revenue .generator for a while. Sorry, don't see this happen, as M$ still needs their proprietary OS as a base for their application sales, which is where they make their money with. Even something like Office365 works only on Windows, and they would loose that base if they would get rid of Windows. And I think it already starts to show that "the cloud" isn't the silver bullet for all application woes... Ralf --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:10 AM Jim Hall wrote: > > This is a very interesting update. Finally Microsoft has released the source > code to MS-DOS under a recognized open source license. And interestingly, the > MIT license (aka Expat license) is compatible with the GNU GPL > (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat) > > These are very old versions of MS-DOS that do not include more advanced > features including CD-ROM support, networking, '386 support, etc. So from a > practical side, FreeDOS would not be able to reuse this code for any modern > features anyway. But for basic features, such as weird edge case > compatibility, we might now be able to reference this code to improve FreeDOS > - assuming the All Rights Reserved proves not to be an issue (I am not a > lawyer). IIRC, the FreeDOS kernel is written largely in C, so the ASM source isn't directly usable. It may be useful to go spelunking for the algorithms used and how corner cases were handled. As for being a lawyer, I assume the current license means what it says. > I wonder what compelled Microsoft to rerelease the source code under a better > open source license? I know I have been asking them to do this for some time, > and even met with some reps from Microsoft's open source division. These > conversations didn't seem to go anywhere; Microsoft appeared not to have much > interest in revisiting the old stuff. > > But I applaud Microsoft for making this move! This is a great step forward. MS is trying to shed the Evil Empire mantle it inherited from IBM, and show how cooperative it is. This release impresses me rather less than open sourcing .NET. And, MS now owns Github. It's no loss to MS to make DOS 1.5 and 2.0 available under a permissive license. DOS has been dead as a commercial product for a long time. (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under something other than the GPL.) I would not be extremely surprised if more of Windows got open sourced. The money these days is in cloud services, and Windows hasn't been the main revenue .generator for a while. __ Dennis ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
This is a very interesting update. Finally Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS under a recognized open source license. And interestingly, the MIT license (aka Expat license) is compatible with the GNU GPL (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat) These are very old versions of MS-DOS that do not include more advanced features including CD-ROM support, networking, '386 support, etc. So from a practical side, FreeDOS would not be able to reuse this code for any modern features anyway. But for basic features, such as weird edge case compatibility, we might now be able to reference this code to improve FreeDOS - assuming the All Rights Reserved proves not to be an issue (I am not a lawyer). - I wonder what compelled Microsoft to rerelease the source code under a better open source license? I know I have been asking them to do this for some time, and even met with some reps from Microsoft's open source division. These conversations didn't seem to go anywhere; Microsoft appeared not to have much interest in revisiting the old stuff. But I applaud Microsoft for making this move! This is a great step forward. On Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > I'm sure a lot of you have seen this on Hacker News, etc: > > "Re-open sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0"; > > https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/09/28/re-open-sourcing-ms-dos-1-25-and-2-0/ > > Originally it was released to the computer history museum with a > restrictive license. > > Now, it has been released to github: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS > > Under an MIT (OSI) License. > > > An issue was opened asking for clarification on the license -it'll be > interesting to see what comes of it; > https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/issues/2 > > > I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can > this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting > some ideas (something verboten under the originally released license). > > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 ...now open source?
Hi! > "Re-open sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0" > https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/09/28/re-open-sourcing-ms-dos-1-25-and-2-0/ ... > Under an MIT (OSI) License. > I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS... If anything, then maybe that ancient config.sys option to support exotic floppy geometries and tapes (?) might be a thing to look at. But who still has such drives? Cheers, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
