Jim, Stallman is clearly a hard person to get along with. Part of the reason is that Microsoft has been a monopoly for so long that the GPL was the only way anyone could have a personal computer run something not MS-DOS and not Windows NT in a realistic sense that they don't have to buy a license for. Until Microsoft isn't a monopoly, Stallman almost has to be the way he is and can hardly change at all. Realize in the 90s that people who wanted a PC regardless of whether or not they wanted to run a Microsoft OS at all on it had to pay for a Windows 9x license. Even today, where is NT lite from Microsoft? Why can't any of us run 32 bit Windows XP without having to activate it today? Windows 2000 Professional doesn't have to be activated, but that isn't even open and should not be used without a license either where Microsoft won't let you buy one from them for it at any price. Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 bit is too expensive at ~$200 for a retail copy. I don't appreciate Microsoft doing away with keys on top of forcing activation and the OS potentially not working unless it can hook to the Microsoft Cloud and verify that you are still allowed to use it. This is terribly abusive along with requiring activation in the first place. When ReactOS is stable, anybody who needs Windows NT won't have to rent Windows from Microsoft anymore where that is obviously Microsoft's opinion of what you will have to do in the near future to have Windows NT on your computer period.
All dos based Microsoft Windows versions and even Windows Millenium are available online for free where museums are taking the huge risk of being prosecuted by Microsoft for giving it away for free with all the keys. Your freedos is extremely valuable and extremely important and it is both needed and wanted. FSF should give a fork of Freedos 1.3 the proper label if that fork is made for the right reasons and given the proper limitations. A fork needs to be done and Freedos 1.3 needs to be fully released as planned. The fork of Freedos 1.3 needs to have IDE and floppy support removed completely from the kernel. This fork has to target modern PCs that do not have a BIOS and it cannot support any proprietary software, but there isn't any proprietary dos software that requires a modern computer without a bios to run anyways. For DOS to live any longer and have any relevance in 2021, we need to bring it to modern hardware. The simplest way to bring FreeDOS to modern hardware is to make a fork that will run syslinux as a superior alternative to grub2 on an EFI computer without a bios. Grub2 royally sucks IMO. Part of the reason grub sucks is that it started out as a bootloader for every imaginable PC OS including Windows NT that works with BIOS. Grub2 is nothing like Grub1 because Grub1 requires you to have a BIOS to work where Grub2 doesn't expect you to have a BIOS at all. EFI is extremely controversial for people who primarily want to run open source operating systems like Linux and who don't want or need to run any closed source software. Sadly, secure boot which is tightly tied to EFI is primarily a Microsoft thing. The open source software world needs to deal with secure boot adequately and permanently. There is a need to stop Microsoft from controlling what a personal computer is and what people can have on their personal computer. Microsoft still has too much control evidenced by the fact that Windows 9x is not open, not free, and there is no free version of Windows NT either from Microsoft despite Microsoft's promise that there would be before Windows XP debuted. Windows 10 is still Windows NT in a lot of ways. Microsoft won't allow anyone to legally use a closed source copy of Windows NT 32 bit without purchasing a license from them. Microsoft won't let you buy a license for 32 bit NT, not even Windows Vista. You should never have to buy 32 bit Windows NT period to use it legally with Microsoft hating it so much these days. Microsoft even hates Windows 7 64 bit already. Most people want to use 32 bit Windows NT when Linux won't cut it. Increasingly, that won't be a problem anymore because of ReactOS, but we aren't quite there yet. ReactOS by the way in VirtualBox on CentOS 8 is stable enough that you can play Warcraft II Battle.Net edition all the way through no problem. You will notice color issues and the map editor isn't usable yet, but the game is playable already. This is the first time I'm aware of that any Windows game that Freedos isn't good enough for can be played legally without having a valid Windows NT or Windows 9x license and you don't have to play it in Linux using WINE either. The ReactOS project was going to provide a free Windows 95, but they decided that that cannot be accomplished. When ReactOS stabilizes fully, maybe the Win32k subsystem can be ported to FreeDOS and we can have a true drop in replacement for Windows 98SE on top of FreeDOS. For that matter, there isn't even an open source drop in replacement for Windows 3.1 where you shouldn't even bother using the closed source Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.11. Blizzard crushed the FreeCraft project and politically they are better off making sure that people play Warcraft III and later legally than they are going after people for illegally playing Warcraft II BNE. Warcraft II by the way should work in Freedos without even Windows 3.1. I'm surprised that I've never downloaded the original Warcraft II, but I have played Warcraft I in Freedos. Jim, FreeDOS has to be forked. The current FreeDOS 1.3 needs to be finished and you need to continue the existing FreeDOS as an IDE/Floppy controller/BIOS DOS that isn't finished until everything that you need MSDOS6.22 for works perfectly in FreeDOS. The current FreeDOS has poor support for SATA and practically no support for USB. SATA and USB support need to be removed completely from the current FreeDOS IMO and you need to state clearly that you don't intend to support these adequately in the current FreeDOS. An alternative to a forking of FreeDOS that makes sense is to complement FreeDOS with a high quality emulator that is targeted at a modern PC to make that PC look like nothing newer than an Intel Pentium I 233 MMX on an early 32 bit PCI motherboard that still had 2 EISA slots on it. This emulator needs to be perfect and it needs to be maintained going forward. It should be easier to fake old hardware on modern hardware than it was to get to FreeDOS 1.0. You can literally strip down modern Linux to create this emulator. Your emulator is the current Linux kernel stripped down to create a fake Pentium I MMX on a modern PC that doesn't have a BIOS at all. The threat of secure boot and EFI to Linux and FreeDOS and any other open source operating system is real. If you want most people to care about FreeDOS, fork it now. The fork must run syslinux on a modern motherboard that expects you to turn on secure boot for Windows 10. Don't even call the fork FreeDOS exactly, because DOS in the modern era has never been on anything that doesn't have a BIOS with the notable exception of the Raspberry Pi where I'm curious how that even works. The Pi uses a RISC processor where the 8086 all the way up to the Penitum I 233 MMX is a CISC processor. The Pi processor is an orange where the IBM PC processor is an apple and you can't compare apples to oranges. I love apples and oranges where it's absurd to try and compare them.
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