On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:47 PM Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> 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 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;...) Yes, DOS 2.0 made a major step there. It borrowed the concepts from Unix, but the implementation was quite different. > > (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! ;-) ) Tom Ehlert's reply makes clear why it probably won't happen. Call it wishful thinking on my part. But there are reasons who folks like Google won't use GPL code. > > 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... Take a look at MS's current financial reports. Where the bulk of their revenue comes from now may surprise you. And note that MS offers free Android versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. They're huge and require a fairly powerful device to run them, but they exist. Windows and Office are no longer the critical drivers to MS growth, and haven't been for a while > Ralf _______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
