On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:17 AM dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> 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&L 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I shake my head when people talk about getting new drivers written so DOS can support stuff created since after it was no longer maintained and supported.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 viral nature of GPL makes it a problem in many cases. The nature of the license is that if your code links against GPLed code, it too, becomes GLPed. An awful lot of the code you might want to link against GPL code will be off limits because the folks who wrote that code won't accept it becoming GPLed. My irony meter pegs off scale when an open source project can't use code from another open source project. The nail in that coffin for me was when GPL3 was incompatible with GPL2. I increasingly wish someone had torpedoed Stallman in his crib. (I've met him. He does not live in the same world I do. He reminds me of a monk in the middle ages, supporting himself with alms donated by pious followers and totally focused on his idea of who God is and what He wants. He has only tenuous contact with the world the rest of us live in. The last time I met him, he was distributing a screed against eBooks. Conversation with him revealed his real problem wasn't that they were electronic - it was that he could not pay for one in cash, but had to have a credit or debit card. I don't think he has either, and wonder what he will do as society becomes increasingly cashless. What happens to him when cash goes away? (And it might in his lifetime.) > 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. 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." > 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. The DOS savvy developers went where the *money* is. People who get paid to write code tend to do that. > 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.) Much software is over engineered. A lot of the stuff like that I've seen is a result of not properly understanding the problem domain and knowing what your software needs to do. > (Sorry for the ramble.) No apology required. _______ 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
