On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 11:22 AM Michael C Robinson <mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote: > > I don't have a few million, but a group able to cobble together a few > million is more realistic to put together.
Where "realistic" is "extremely unlikely" instead of "totally impossible" > Question is, how much would membership cost in a group whose goal is > to GPL Windows 16 and 32 bit be? Say such a group came into existence > and a million people joined for $20/month. Can you get $DEITY to work a miracle to get those million folks to sign up? That's about what would be required. > The first target, Windows > 16 bit land. Then, the 32 bit version of Windows including 9x and ME. > Eventually, the group would be able to open source the MS-DOS based > versions of Windows completely and membership fees could be reduced or > even dropped. Maybe the source code isn't needed, maybe just the > interfaces and the design are needed. Win3.X->Win9X were multitasking shells running on top of DOS. But the need for DOS decreased as development continued. By the time Win98 hit the streets, DOS was a real mode loader for Win98, and once Win98 was running, DOS was out of the loop. Win98 was the OS, and it handled things like accessing the file system DOS was previously used for. Speaking as someone who had to support Win9X in the workplace, and spent *way* too much time beating it into submission, I was *delighted* when Win2k arrived and I could run an N T version of Windows with NTFS as the file system. My Win2K machine was up 24/7 and Just Ran. I only rebooted if I was fiddling with hardware or installing something that required it. My last Win98SE installation reached the point where I was rebooting four or five times a day, and this is *with* me doing my best to keep a clean uncluttered installation. The problem was resources. Microsoft allocated them as part of the GDI heap, and they held stuff like what was displayed on your screen. But the amount allocated was fixed - in Win3.X is was two 64K heaps. In Win9X it was one 128K heap, This was true no matter how much RAM you had installed. Programs would allocate resources when they ran but not always free them whrn they exited. (Microsoff Excel was a Worst Offender about this.) When Windows thought resources were exhausted, a reboot was required. I wouldn't mind an environment that supported old 16bit stuff from in3.X. There really isn't anything I can think of from Win9X I care about. I'm afraid I wouldn't join the crowdfunding effort. My response to Win9X these days is "Run Away! Run Away!" ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
