On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 2:09 PM, C. Masloch <c...@bttr-software.de> wrote: > >> > >> Well, the whole point of FreeDOS existing at all is that MS dropped > >> the ball, and they wanted a free alternative that they could update > >> and share freely. > > > > ... which does not necessitate strong copyleft, as we all know. It also > > does not necessitate that language choice, actually. I'm aware of > > pragmatic reasoning for both though, you merely didn't make it explicit > > here. > > Originally it was PD-DOS, but they quickly changed that. I can only > blindly guess why since I wasn't personally involved back then. >
Since I started FreeDOS, I can tell you why. :-) When Microsoft said they were dropping DOS and moving everyone to Windows, I wanted to find a way to keep DOS around. I loved DOS, and hated Windows. I wasn't alone; lots of "power users" weren't fond of Windows 3.11. I had been a part-time Linux user since 1993, and the folks behind Linux had done an excellent job of creating a free version of Unix. If people could make their own free Unix, I figured it couldn't be that hard to create a free version of DOS. After all, DOS is a much simpler operating system compared to Unix. I posted an announcement to comp.os.msdos.apps about my intention to create a free version of DOS. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.os.msdos.apps/oQmT4ETcSzU I named it "PD-DOS" or "Public Domain DOS" for two main reasons: 1. I'd already done some poking around on sites with free source code, and found several utilities that reproduced DOS functionality, and added new features. These programs were already released to the public domain, and I followed their trend. 2. I was a college student who didn't understand the key differences between "public domain" and "free as in freedom". Several folks contacted me, interested in helping out with my free DOS idea. But it didn't take long for us to see the consequences of putting our code into the "public domain". If code is released to the public domain, anyone can use it without restriction. But there would be no license to protect us, to keep someone like Microsoft from copying our code, and re-releasing it as their own under a proprietary license. We didn't want that to happen. So as I wrote my programs, I started to use the GNU GPL. This made it clear that anyone could use my programs, and the source code would remain free and open to everyone. And it prevented others from re-releasing my programs without making sure people had access to the source code. I was happy with that. I opted not to use MIT or BSD for personal reasons, I just thought the GNU GPL was the right one for me. Since we then had a mix of programs written under different licenses (the originals that we found were released to the public domain, our new programs were under the GNU GPL, etc.) we figured "Public Domain DOS" was no longer appropriate. So we changed the name to "Free-DOS", to reflect that our DOS was free for everyone to use. We kept the hyphen because every version of DOS had a hyphen in the name. We kept the hyphen until the time when Pat published his book, 'The FreeDOS Kernel'. I always understood that his editor dropped the hyphen for style reasons. Since we weren't exactly "married" to that hyphen, we changed our name from "Free-DOS" to "FreeDOS", and have remained so ever since. -jh ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
