On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 7:33 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 6:00 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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." > > I'm disappointed to read the above statement. And I'm really confused > why you would write "Why use FreeDOS at all" on an email list that's > about FreeDOS. This is not helpful and does not contribute to the > FreeDOS community.
I'm sorry you're disappointed, but it's a valid question. Suppose you give me *your* answer. Why do *you* think FreeDOS should be used? The FreeDOS mailing list goes to people who *use* FreeDOS. My question "Why use FreeDOS at all" doesn't apply to them nor is it likely to change their minds. They have reasons valid to *them* for doing so. Why should anybody *else* run it? > There are still lots of people who use FreeDOS. Some people use > FreeDOS to restore old PC hardware. Others use FreeDOS to play DOS > games or run legacy business software - either in a PC emulator or on > real hardware. A few people still use FreeDOS to run embedded systems. > What we all have is common is using FreeDOS. And that's what the > FreeDOS email lists are about. If you don't want to use FreeDOS, you > don't have to reply to the email list. I'm aware of why people on the FreeDOS list use it. A few are still clinging to and supporting the DOS setup they created and were happy with decades ago, and don't want to switch. As long as they *can* do that, more power to them, but at some point I don't think they'll be *able* to continue that way. The PC Gaming crowd is why DOSBox exists, and has the advantage of being cross-platform and allowing you to play PC games on things that *aren't* X86 based PCs. (I have some old DOS stuff running on an ARM based Android tablet using an Android port of DOSBox.) More simply want to run old DOS apps that will run under FreeDOS. But you can *run* most DOS applications on a machine running DOSBox, or on a Windows PC using a fork of DOSBox called vDOSPlus, which is how I do it. vDOSPlus implements a virtual machine with enough of what DOS programs expect to see to allow them to run. I have a number of older DOS apps I can run that way. Computers are tools that people use to work or play. The work or play is performed by applications that run on the computer. The basic question when getting a computer is "What do you need to do?" We are seeing increasing levels of application portability, as applications get written in scripting languages like Java or Python, or as HTML5/CSS/JavaScript bundles, or now written for the .NET framework which has been made open source and is available under Linux and OS/X. We are reaching the point where the OS you run simply may not *matter*. Your device choice will be matters of form factor and price, because the apps you need will run on whatever it happens to be. When I say FreeDOS, it's a bit like when I say Linux - in both cases, I am implicitly referring to the OS *kernel* There are lots of things, for example, that use a Linux kernel and are therefore Linux systems. My old Linksys WRT54G Wifi router was a Linux system. Because it used a Linux kernel, the source was available, and various third party efforts to replace the stock firmware appeared. I ran one called Tomato. Other things thqat have a Linux kernel uder the hood are the Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook eBook reader devices (and source for their Linux kernel and firmware is available. But the average user of those devices neither knows nor cares that Linux is under the hood, and doesn't *have* to know or care;. They can use the device to do what they want to do. This is a *good* thing. In terms of FreeDOS, properly speaking the challenge is to get the FreeDOS kernel to be the bootable OS on X86 hardware. If all you want to do is run old DOS software, or play old DOS games, you don't actually need to do that. So tell me, Jim: why should anyone go through the sometimes considerable effort to create a device that boots FreeDOS? I submit they will do it as a labor of love to see if they can, but the number who *will* do that is a small fraction of the total number of folks who just want to play old DOS games or run old DOS apps. Those folks simply don't *need* to *boot* FreeDOS an a device to do what they want to do. Suggesting that they *should* run FreeDOS in those cases is a disservice to them. > Jim ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
