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
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