Hi, On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:02 PM dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> 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&L 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 unpopular nowadays, but it's still a well-known niche. > > You have a talent for understatement. The last ten years have been especially unkind to DOS, not just because of buggy Windows (which shows their bias and disinterest) but also because of the obvious AMD64 incompatibility (although VT-X helps a ton, and even that is circa 2010 for Intel). Of course, the upcoming death of the traditional BIOS will also hurt, but by now we're used to living with old hardware and/or virtual machines. I do not expect DOS to live forever. Heck, there are already people chanting for the death of IA-32, Win32 (API), etc. You would think at least that would be worth preserving, but no, some geeks just like deprecating and obsoleting everything. It's somewhat frustrating. Maybe I'm irrational, but I don't like throwing away good software. > > 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? There's a strange dichotomy here: "DOS is useless, and nobody uses it." ... but ... "DOS software is still sold, still copyrighted, still proprietary, do not share!" What I'm saying is that people have been saying it's dead and useless for decades. Yes, we hobbyists have kept the flame alive (barely). Yes, we still appreciate various wonderful things (DJGPP!). But my point is that some people are still (commercially) holding on to it, refusing to give up. It doesn't matter if you think it's irrational, it's just the way things are. "Everybody should switch to Linux, it does literally everything!" I swear that's how some zealots talk. It's a bit ridiculous. I'm in no way able to discount Linux's success. It's amazing, and yes, it does a ton of things very very well. It's a truly brilliant bunch. But let's not always oversimplify everything. There are different use cases for different tools. Another overhyped thing would be Java (or maybe C++). "Everything should be Java or C++", which is quite exaggerated. Surely we don't (individually) need thousands of programming languages, but that doesn't mean those two are a perfect fit (or maybe at all) for many projects. People are too short-sighted and can't see past their own limited sphere of influence. It's better to give the benefit of the doubt rather than assuming everyone using "old" or "bad" tech is somehow stupid, deluded, inefficient, cheap, etc. > "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... I'm just saying that it's still worth actual money to "some" people. > > 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". > > 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. Who knows what reasons people have (or could have). I don't know. It's not impossible. Not everything is about money. Perhaps more simplicity, available documentation, accessibility? I honestly don't know. Money (by itself) won't make someone a good programmer. I still insist that most people (myself included) aren't skilled enough. Certainly, motivation (and/or necessity) plays some small role, too, but I think that's a lesser problem. > > > (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. Which is insane, IMNSHO, but maybe they have a good reason (doubt it!). When something like software is stuck in legal limbo, I think someone dropped the ball. It's just dumb when literally no one can use it, no one can "fix" the law, no one can do anything. That is a bug. > 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. Yes, incompatibility is dumb, so is lack of interoperability for vain reasons. Certainly license proliferation is frowned upon, but people are obsessed with control. (Well, except pragmatists who just want to get the job done, but even then it's all too easy to overlook licensing, which can be a real problem, sadly.) It's better to be proactive from the start and avoid all such problems (licensing, portability, non-standardness) before even starting. If you want to be successful and productive and have your software last a long time and help the greatest number of people, maybe you shouldn't ignore the obvious pitfalls. (Some people have experience in that, but most do not. That needs to be more widely warned against.) > I increasingly wish someone had torpedoed Stallman in his crib. What, is he a fish? Does he live underwater? ;-) > (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. "Saint Ignucius, pray for us!" He's not religious, but yes, he treats it as ethics. Moreso I think he just dislikes greed (hoarding), too much control (hidden backdoors, DRM), and arrogance (we lock you out, we own it, you can't use or develop for it, even if we abandon it or you) and similar problems (not helping your brother by sharing sources with him for obvious improvements). He's very old-fashioned in the sense that he thinks software used to be freely shared, in the geek mentality, where people enjoyed improving things publicly. You know, art for art's sake, not necessarily for milking as many people as possible for endless royalties (with tons of forced upgrades, downgrades, expenses). I do think he's (mostly?) righteous, and I think it's rebellion against greed and irrational legalism. Certainly it's not wrong to make money, even from software, and he wouldn't say it is. But there is a line where it still helps you but hurts others more. > 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.) He probably doesn't want to be hacked or mistreated by rogue governments. In fairness to him, there's a lot of jerks in the world who would love to hurt him (and frankly almost anyone else, even if unimportant). I don't blame him too hard because it really is a dangerous world. It's more common than you'd think (sadly). And it's a shame because we've all built up so much good things (electronics, software, Internet), but a few bad apples can easily destroy it all (or most of it) due to their own vices. It could definitely crumble into ashes, and we'd have nothing left. I absolutely do not trust anyone (by default) to even care, much less try, to protect us from all the bad entities in the world. Sadly, the world usually only looks out for itself, it's very selfish, and it doesn't care who else's house is burning down. And that's "at best", sometimes they are directly hostile! > 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." It does work! Maybe it doesn't do what you want, maybe you don't know how to use it properly, but it does exist. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
